By “global warming” these papers don’t, of course, mean the mild warming of around 0.8 degrees Celsius that the planet has experienced since the middle of the 19th century as the world crawled out of the Little Ice Age. Pretty much everyone, alarmists and skeptics alike, is agreed on that....Rather, they mean ...“Global warming” as in the scary, historically unprecedented, primarily man-made phenomenon which we must address urgently before the icecaps melt and the Pacific islands disappear beneath the waves and all the baby polar bears drown.

What all these papers argue in their different ways is that the alarmist version of global warming — aka Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) — is a fake artifact. That is, all these different experts from around the world — China, Russia, Canada, the U.S., Italy, etc. — have been looking closely at different aspects of the global warming puzzle in various regions and on different timescales and come to the conclusion in irreproachable, peer-reviewed scientific ways that there is no evidence to support the global warming scare story.

Several of the U.S.’s top climatologists and at least two Nobel Prize winning physicists are among some 30,000 U.S. scientists to have signed a petition saying that “the human-caused global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity.” The “Global Warming Petition Project” has 31,487 signers and is growing. The petition “strongly rejects as unproven the hypothesis of man-made global warming or climate change.” It reads:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

The petition also urges the U.S. government “to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.”

In PhD scientist signers alone, the project already includes15-times more scientists than are seriously involved in the United Nations IPCC process. The very large number of petition signers demonstrates that, if there is a consensus among American scientists, it is in opposition to the human-caused global warming hypothesis rather than in favor of it.

So, was President Trump right to withdraw from the Paris Accord? What does it say? And what has been its effect?

Why are multinational banks, and multinational corporations, and multinational investment groups and pension funds so desperate to retain the Paris agreement? Simple, those funds have been used by the multinational interests to create the entire system.

What does it say?

If you believe - wrongly in my opinion - that reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will stop 'catastrophic global warming', you may support the Paris Accord If you actually read it, you would realize that it does NOTHING substantive to limit CO2 on the planet.

"Developed country Parties should continue to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions, including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing country Parties. Such mobilization of climate finance should represent a progression beyond previous efforts.”

That paragraph above is the heart and soul of the Paris Accord. It isn’t about science. It isn’t about saving the planet. It is about a small group of very powerful globalists generating TRILLIONS of dollars in a worldwide climate change machine that would shift money from the American taxpayers to “developing country Parties.”

Even if every nation in the world adheres to its climate change commitments by 2030 the only difference it will make to “global warming” by the end of this century will be to reduce the world’s temperatures by 0.048°C (0.086°F).

Even if you’d spent $1 million a day every day since the birth of Jesus, you’d still be less than half the way to reaching $1.5 trillion.

He continues in his unimitable way

We’ve talked about the financial cost of these policies. What we haven’t yet mentioned are the social costs: the hundreds of thousands prematurely killed by the fuel poverty brought about by the drive for “clean energy”; the wildlife sliced and diced or fried by bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes and solar arrays; the remote landscapes ravaged by pylons connecting turbines to the grid; the billions of man-hours wasted on recycling; the increased pollution due to the misguided Europe-wide adoption of “low carbon” diesel cars; the rainforest chopped down and the agricultural land wasted to grow biofuels; the debasement of science for political ends; the needless panic induced in a generation or more of children; the assault on economic progress; the destruction of American forests to create wood-chips to burn as biomass; the harassment, vilification and defunding of skeptical scientists; the diversion of scarce public resources into intellectually bankrupt fields like “climate science”; the corruption of once-proud institutions like NASA, the Royal Society, and the Met Office; and so on.

April 22, 2017

Celebrate environmental successes

Air quality
Data from the Environmental Protection Agency show that, from 1995-2015, levels of every air pollutant it monitors saw steady declines, to the point where they are at or below national standards.

Carbon monoxide levels plunged 72% over those years;

nitrogen dioxide fell 45%;

ozone, 24%;

soot, 37%;

sulfur dioxide, 73%; and

lead declined 93%.

The share of children tested who showed high levels of lead in their blood dropped from close to 8% in 1995 to just 0.5% by 2015.

Water qualityWater quality overall has improved, with once severely polluted lakes, rivers and streams clearing up.
Per-capita water use has declined 30% since 1975, notes the U.S. Geological Survey.

Soil qualityVast improvements in farming technology mean farmers use less water and far fewer pesticides to grow more crops. Improvements in crop yields has let the country reclaim vast acres of forestland. In fact, forest acreage has climbed 6% since 1920, despite the tripling of the U.S. population, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Carbon dioxide emissions In 2015, CO2 emissions were below where they stood in 1996. That's despite the fact that there are 52 million more people living in the U.S., and despite the fact that the nation's economic output was 61% bigger, after adjusting for inflation. CO2 emission have dropped 9% since 2005, according to EPA data.

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich

“In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt

April 5, 2017

You can forget solar roadways

An expensive solar road project in Idaho can’t even power a microwave most days, according to the project’s energy data.

The Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways project generated an average of 0.62 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per day since it began publicly posting power data in late March. To put that in perspective, the average microwave or blow drier consumes about 1 kWh per day....

The panels have been under-performing their expectations due to design flaws, but even if they had worked perfectly they’d have only powered a single water fountain and the lights in a nearby restroom.

Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways has been in development for 6.5 years and received a total of $4.3 million in funding to generate 90 cents worth of electricity.

April 30, 2016

University hides good news about fracking so as not to disappoint environmental funders

Geologists at the University of Cincinnati just wrapped up a three-year investigation of hydraulic fracturing and its impact on local water supplies. The result? There's no evidence—zero, zilch, nada—that fracking contaminates drinking water. Researchers hoped to keep these findings secret.

Why would a public research university boasting a top-100 geology program deliberately hide its work? Because, as lead researcher Amy Townsend-Small explained, "our funders, the groups that had given us funding in the past, were a little disappointed in our results. They feel that fracking is scary and so they were hoping our data could point to a reason to ban it."

That an environmentalist ideologue would see evidence of fracking's safety as "disappointing" is to be expected. But that a university would so flagrantly put politics before science is deeply troubling.

Hydraulic fracturing has significantly bolstered America's energy independence by unlocking an abundance of domestic oil and gas. In fact, our country has officially surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia as the global leader in natural gas and oil production, respectively.

Just as important, these newfound energy resources have delivered economic benefits to Americans. In 2012, the average U.S. household had an extra $1,200 thanks to the energy boom. The oil and gas industry, meanwhile, supports more than 2 million jobs—a number that is expected to grow to nearly 5 million by 2025.

This energy renaissance has also helped the environment since fracking provides a cheaper, cleaner alternative to coal. Last April, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions hit a 27-year low, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, thanks largely to a widespread transition from coal to natural gas.

April 23, 2016

"Never Trust The Doom-Mongers: Earth Day Predictions That Were All Wrong"

1: “Civilization Will End Within 15 or 30 Years.”Harvard biologist Dr. George Wald warned shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 that civilization would soon end “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Three years before his projection, Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine....

2: “100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving to Death During the Next Ten Years.”Stanford professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich declared in April 1970 that mass starvation was imminent. ...

3: “Population Will Inevitably and Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases in Food Supplies We Make.”Paul Ehrlich....

4: “Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously … Thirty Years From Now, the Entire World … Will Be in Famine.”....

5: “In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have to Wear Gas Masks to Survive Air Pollution.”
Life magazine stated in January 1970 ....

6: “Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless the Parents Hold a Government License.”
David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club made the above claim and went on to say that “[a]ll potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.....

his girlfriend of five years to death, fracturing her skull in a dozen places, Ira stuffed her body into a trunk, which he packed into a closet where it remained until discovered by the police nearly two years later...[after her] parents hired an investigator who very quickly came up with sufficient evidence for a warrant to search Einhorn's apartment...[where] the battered and partly mummified body of Holly Maddux was found in a trunk in a bedroom closet, packed in styrofoam, newspaper, and air fresheners.

Arrested, Einhorn's attorney was considering a run for the Senate. His name was Arlen Spector, of Pennsylvania. The darling of New Age society, politicians, Ivy League professors, and corporate executives alike,Einhorn had no shortage of friends during his bail hearing. With his great love for the earth, surely Ira would not have murdered anyone. Released on a mere $40,000 bail, of which he had to pay only ten percent, Einhorn fled to Sweden, remaining as a fugitive in Europe until 1997, when he was found living in France under another name.

While a fugitive, Einhorn was convicted in absentia in 1993, and sentenced to life in prison. The government of France, however, refused to extradite Einhorn unless the death penalty was taken off the table and he was promised a new trial. Eventually, this was agreed upon. Ira Einhorn, the founder of Earth Day, was once again convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

April 11, 2016

The Climate Inquisition Begins

Treating climate change as an absolute, unassailable fact, instead of what it is—an unproven, controversial scientific theory—a group of state attorneys general have announced that they will be targeting any companies that challenge the catastrophic climate change religion.

The coalition of 17 inquisitors are calling themselves “AGs United for Clean Power.” The coalition consists of 15 state attorneys general (California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington State), as well as the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands. Sixteen of the seventeen members are Democrats, while the attorney general for the Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, is an independent.

The inquisitors are threatening legal action and huge fines against anyone who declines to believe in an unproven scientific theory....The American Climate Change Inquisition appears to be just getting started. By threatening legal action and huge fines against anyone who declines to believe their climate theories, the attorneys general in this coalition are trying to end the debate over climate change, declaring any dissent to be blasphemy regardless of what many scientists believe. This strikes a serious blow against the free flow of ideas and the vigorous debate over scientific issues that is a hallmark of an advanced, technological society like ours.

Last Friday, Claude Walker, attorney general of the US Virgin Islands issued a Subpoena to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) for ten years of internal documents regarding CEI's work on climate change and energy policy including private donor information.

Hans von Spakovsky, Heritage Foundation on The Left's Climate Inquisition: "This investigation is intended to silence and chill any opposition. It is disgraceful and contemptible behavior by public officials who are willing to exploit their power to achieve ideological ends….This affront to our grand tradition of free speech and vigorous scientific debate that should not be tolerated.

Megan McArdle, Bloomberg View, in Subpoenaed Into Silence calls the new developments “an attempt to criminalize advocacy”....It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional....Prosecutors know the damage they can do even when they don't have a leg to stand on. The threat of investigation can coerce settlements even in weak cases....the process itself can be the punishment, as victims are forced to spend immense amounts on legal fees, and immense time and money on complying with investigations

This is the latest effort in an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and former Vice President Al Gore.....CEI will vigorously fight to quash this subpoena. It is an affront to our First Amendment rights of free speech and association for Attorney General Walker to bring such intimidating demands against a nonprofit group,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “If Walker and his allies succeed, the real victims will be all Americans, whose access to affordable energy will be hit by one costly regulation after another, while scientific and policy debates are wiped out one subpoena at a time.”

Not only are things not as bad as we thought, they are much, much better. And they’re improving. Crop output is up, the world is greener, storms are down in frequency and number, and on and on, despite the forecasts of doom foisted on the public by politicians and media.

But why are things better? Because of the beneficial effects of releasing carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere. Craig Idso, a bona fide scientist who also spoke at the event, cataloged the good CO2 does. Plants grow not just a little better when CO2 is increased, but they are vastly improved. They have greater mass, more roots, better leafs, they use water more efficiently and, the biggest surprise, they react to warmer temperatures more robustly. These entirely salutary effects are so well known (to scientists) that commercial greenhouses artificially boost CO2 to levels about three times higher than are found in the atmosphere.

In times past, atmospheric CO2 levels were up to 30 times higher — pause and reflect on the number — than they are now; and indeed we are now in a historic, almost dangerously low, period. Yet even though CO2 was then so much higher than mankind could ever hope now to achieve even if we burn every drop of oil that exists, there was no runaway global warming. Why should we expect it now?

The study in the journal Nature published Thursday examining Northern Hemisphere rainfall data going back 1,200 years found that today’s climate models were frequently wrong on predicting extreme rain and drought. In the 20th century, for example, higher-than-average temperatures failed to produce wet-dry extremes, which contradicts the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s consensus that global warming will make dry areas drier and wet areas wetter.

Al Gore: Ten years ago, the former vice president of the United States launched an extraordinarily lucrative career by selling climate doomsday. While promoting his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, he made a shockingly false statement. He said that unless the world took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gases, it would reach a “point of no return” in ten years.

ABC/Walt Disney Company: Good Morning America claimed that in 2015 milk would cost almost $13 a gallon, gas would be more than $9 a gallon, “flames [would] cover hundreds of square miles,” one billion people would be malnourished, and Manhattan would be flooding — all because of climate change.

United Nations: In 2007, the chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajenda Pachauri, said, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. . . . What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.

March 30, 2016

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy"

Former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy? “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
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Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement, "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit.

Climate change is the biggest scam in the history of the world – a $1.5 trillion-a-year conspiracy against the taxpayer, every cent, penny and centime of which ends in the pockets of the wrong kind of people, none of which goes towards a cause remotely worth funding, all of it a complete and utter waste.
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Well it has often been said – and there is much anecdotal evidence to support this – that after the Berlin Wall came down the left had a bit of a problem. Capitalism had won the economic argument. Where could the left go next? But the solution was there waiting them – the green movement. In the guise of saving the world’s environment they could advance all their usual obsessions – control, regulation, state intervention, puritanism, compulsory immiseration – though this time with a smiling, fluffy face. Watermelons they call them: green on the outside, red on the inside.

So the Berlin Wall came down but it never really went away. And sometimes I look at the world and what has been happening with the rise and rise of green lunacy and I ask myself: did the right side really win the Cold War or is it just an illusion?

Europe’s suicidal green energy policies are killing at least 40,000 people a year. That’s just the number estimated to have died in the winter of 2014 because they were unable to afford fuel bills driven artificially high by renewable energy tariffs.

But the real death toll will certainly be much higher when you take into account the air pollution caused when Germany decided to abandon nuclear power after Fukushima and ramp up its coal-burning instead; and also when you consider the massive increase in diesel pollution – the result of EU-driven anti-CO2 policies – which may be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths a year.

November 1, 2015

“You would probably have to go quite a long way back in human history to find [such a] mad obsession”

Later this month, France will be hosting the 21st Session on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11) with a stated purpose of achieving a new international agreement on climate to keep global warming below 2°C. So when a society of French mathematicians release a white paper saying the UN's fight against global warming “absurd” and “a costly and pointless crusade, I pay attention.

“You would probably have to go quite a long way back in human…history to find [such a] mad obsession,” ….
The mathematicians harshly criticized a “crusade [that] has invaded every area of activity and everyone’s thinking," noting that "the battle [against] CO2 has become a national priority. "How have we reached this point in a country that claims to be rational?” they ask, adding that mathematicians “do not believe in crusades. They look at facts, figures, comments and arguments.”….

There is not a single fact, figure…[or] observation that leads us to conclude the world’s climate is in any way ‘disturbed,” the paper states. “It is variable, as it has always been. "…. The French mathematicians also said that the UN’s climate models have failed to take into account natural phenomena that affects climate far more than human activity. Human impact on the climate is “tiny, quite negligible in comparison with natural causes,” they point out. “Human beings can do nothing about solar activity, the state of the oceans, the temperature of the Earth’s magna, or the composition of the atmosphere.”….

Furthermore, the work done by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not meet the basic standards set by reputable scientific journalsbecause its “conclusions go [contrary] to observed facts; the figures used are deliberately chosen to support its conclusions (with no regard for the most basic scientific honesty); and the variability of natural phenomena is passed over without comment.”…….

“People who do not believe in global warming have been told to shut up. No public debate, no contradictory discourse. No articles in scientific journals. They simply have been told that the case is proven and it is time to take action… We are simply required to keep quiet and do what we are told. No second opinion is permitted.” “It is on the debris of the fundamental principles of the law and of democracy that this white paper has been written.”

Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans, a former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science. He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly. He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says. “Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades”.

It never looks like hysteria when you are in the middle of it. It never feels like a mania when you are being consumed by righteous zealotry. It never looks or feels like a cult when you believe it to the depths of your soul.

True believers are never swayed by the evidence. They believe the absence of empirical data is a test of their faith. They might skew the data in order to lure in those who still hold to an outmoded view of empirical science, but they themselves have given their lives to the narrative, not to the facts……

In a strange way the climate change hysteria is like what others have called the madness of crowds. It is like selling your house and your business in order to buy a tulip bulb. How did that one work out?

Earlier this year, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists took part in a study that found — no surprise — that the "pause" in global warming from 1998 to 2013 didn't exist. Their change didn't come from actual temperature readings. It came from extensive data manipulation and tinkering. Instead of a pause, they found a surge.

What's strange is that major temperature revisions by NOAA and others in recent years have always been up — never down — a clear sign of possible bias. Earlier this year, for instance, it was revealed that nearly half of all supposed global warming in recent NASA data came from the agency's own highly suspicious statistical changes, not from actual temperature readings.

Enter Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and chairman of the House Science Committee. Curious, he subpoenaed NOAA for research documents related to the study. NOAA refused to hand them over. Smith's committee wants to know why.

"The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made," Smith said this week.

August 10, 2015

Links to interesting stories that I don't have the time to blog

The American public, we the people, lately swoon into a morass of multi-dimensional failure: failure to control their economic lives, to regulate their appetites and their bodies, to understand what is happening to them, to fend off the propaganda and distractions that disable them, and to properly express and direct their wrath at those elements of the polity who deserve it.

True, their awful, epic failures at this moment in history are largely engineered and aggravated by those who have captured the polity and turned it into a looting and racketeering engine. The net result, though, is a self-reinforcing circle of degradation that rots the collective ethos of the public while it destroys the vessel of the republic that contains it.

The EPA was investigating pollution from the long-ago abandoned Gold King Mine, which is located about 80 miles north of New Mexico. The EPA was apparently trying to clean up the waste water, but instead managed to burst a plug holding it in, thereby releasing slug that contained zinc, iron, copper and other heavy metals.

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 1,472%. Sweden is now number two on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa.

“I think that iPhones and dating apps have really changed the way that dating happens for our generation,” says Stephanie, the one with an arm full of bracelets.

“There is no dating. There’s no relationships,” says Amanda, the tall elegant one. “They’re rare. You can have a fling that could last like seven, eight months and you could never actually call someone your ‘boyfriend.’ [Hooking up] is a lot easier. No one gets hurt—well, not on the surface.”

The brave British marksman saved the terrified eight-year-old and his father after taking out the crazed jihadi with a head shot from 1,000 metres away. The special forces crack shot then killed two other members of the hated terror group, who were also taking part in the sick planned execution.

ISIS militants had decreed that the little boy and his father must die after branding them "infidels" because they refused to denounce their faith. They were just seconds from death when the hero sniper intervened to stop the barbaric killing in the Syrian desert. The pair were part of the minority Shia sect of Islam which ISIS considers to be heretical.

May 8, 2015

Iran is running out of water

A ranking Iranian political figure, Issa Kalantari, recently warned that past mistakes leave Iran with water supplies so insufficient that up to 70 percent, or 55 million out of 78 million Iranians, would be forced to abandon their native country for parts unknown.

Many facts buttress Kalantari's apocalyptic prediction: Once lauded in poetry, Lake Urmia, the Middle East's largest lake, has lost 95 percent of its water since 1996, going from 31 billion cubic meters to 1.5 billion. What the Seine is to Paris, the Zayanderud was to Isfahan – except the latter went bone-dry in 2010. Over two-thirds of Iran's cities and towns are "on the verge of a water crisis" that could result in drinking water shortages; already, thousands of villages depend on water tankers. Unprecedented dust storms disrupt economic activity and damage health.

Except Israel

the sole exception to this regional tale of woe. It too, as recently as the 1990s, suffered water shortages; but now, thanks to a combination of conservation, recycling, innovative agricultural techniques, and high-tech desalination, the country is awash in H2O (Israel's Water Authority: "We have all the water we need"). I find particularly striking that Israel can desalinate about 17 liters of water for one U.S. penny; and that it recycles about five times more water than does second-ranked Spain.

April 22, 2015

Killing Birds

It’s been five years since BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and released 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico….The liberal blog Mother Jones reports that 800,000 birds have been killed and the Pelican population in the Gulf has decreased 12 percent. While the 2010 Gulf spill was indeed a horrible disaster, the number of birds that died pales in comparison the number killed in the last five years due to wind turbines.
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A 2013 study found that 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats are killed every year by wind turbines — a figure 30 percent higher than the federal government estimated in 2009. These deaths have likely increased as wind power capacity increases across the country…..

In the time since the 2010 BP oil spill, some 2.9 million birds have been killed by wind turbines, using Smallwood’s figures, compared to only 800,000 that have been killed by the oil spill — the oil spill deaths are based on figures compiled by the news site Climate Desk. It should also be noted that wind turbines routinely kill federally protected birds and eagles.

April 20, 2015

California drought a man-made disaster

I'm far from California, but I worked in the federal government for several years with the Endangered Species Act so, despite my warm feelings for animals, I know what a terrible, draconian law it is. In a time of severe drought, the law is perverse and its effects on our food supply will affect the entire nation.

'Man-made disaster': Critics say California drought caused by misguided environment policies“This is a man-made disaster,” said Bonner Cohen, senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research. “Southern California is an arid part of the world where droughts -- even severe droughts -- are commonplace, and knowing this, you’d think the government of California would have included this mathematical certainty in its disaster preparedness planning, but the government has done nothing, not even store rain, as the population has continued to grow.”
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Droughts are nothing new in California, but right now, 70 percent of California's rainfall washes out to sea because liberals have prevented the construction of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades, during a period in which California’s population has doubled,” said Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard and likely GOP presidential candidate. “This is the classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people's lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.
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During the current drought, which began in 2012, and by some estimates could be the most severe in recorded history, billions of gallons of water have been diverted from farmlands, according to a report by the Washington D.C.-based Heritage Foundation, with the American Farm Bureau estimating that between 400,000 acres and 500,000 acres of crops will be lost.

Fiorina said it’s a “tragedy” that the agricultural land in California, the most productive in the world, has been destroyed, along with farming jobs because of politics, policy, and liberal environmentalists."

‘What Civilized Society Destroys Its Own Food Source For A Three-Inch Fish?' (video)
Republican Assemblywoman Shannon Grove — who represents part of Kern County, the second largest agricultural sector in the country — has been trying to get the word out about how Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations apparently are literally draining water into the sea all for the sake of a three-inch fish.

Should California Spend 4 Billion Gallons to Save a Few Fish?"IN THE THE heart of California’s drought-parched Central Valley, fruit and vegetable supplier to the nation, a water district is defying a federal order to give some endangered trout a 3.9 billion gallon water ride out to sea. And it could be the first skirmish in a much wider conflict."

California’s Water Woes Are Priceless by Holman Jenkins in the WSJ
The problem can be solved in five words: charge realistic prices for water......Right now, farmers receive their public water through occult combinations of hereditary rights, political lobbying, and an emerging market of transferable water rights that politicians keep threatening to kill. ....Making the desert bloom is a lovely sentiment but makes sense only if it makes economic sense: Using five gallons of California’s water to produce a walnut probably doesn’t make sense if water is realistically priced. But then neither does a forthcoming San Diego plant that would incur large energy costs to convert seawater into drinking water.
Joel Kotkin in the Daily Beast, California Is So Over"California’s drought and how it’s handled show just what kind of place the Golden State is becoming: feudal, super-affluent and with an impoverished interior.
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What we are witnessing the breakdown of a once-expansive, open society into one dominated by a small group of plutocrats, largely in Silicon Valley, with an “amen” crew among the low-information donors of Hollywood, the public unions, the green lobby, and wealthy real estate developers favored by Brown’s pro-density policies. This coalition backs Brown and helps maintain the state’s essentially one-party system. No one is more adamant about reducing people’s carbon footprint than the jet set of Silicon Valley or the state’s planning elite, even if they choose not to live in a manner that they instruct all others.

This fundamentally hypocritical regime remains in place because it works—for the powerful and well-placed.

Wind power, for all the public money spent on its expansion, has inched up to—wait for it—1% of world energy consumption in 2013. Solar, for all the hype, has not even managed that: If we round to the nearest whole number, it accounts for 0% of world energy consumption….Both wind and solar are entirely reliant on subsidies for such economic viability as they have.
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The two fundamental problems that renewables face are that they take up too much space and produce too little energy…..To run the U.S. economy entirely on wind would require a wind farm the size of Texas, California and New Mexico combined—backed up by gas on windless days. To power it on wood would require a forest covering two-thirds of the U.S., heavily and continually harvested.
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the trickle of energy that human beings managed to extract from wind, water and wood before the Industrial Revolution placed a great limit on development and progress…..fossil fuels were a unique advance because they allowed human beings to create extraordinary patterns of order and complexity—machines and buildings—with which to improve their lives.

The result of this great boost in energy is what the economic historian and philosopher Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment. In the case of the U.S., there has been a roughly 9,000% increase in the value of goods and services available to the average Americansince 1800, almost all of which are made with, made of, powered by or propelled by fossil fuels.

March 15, 2015

Attention is a resource

Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it. And yet we’ve auctioned off more and more of our public space to private commercial interests, with their constant demands on us to look at the products on display or simply absorb some bit of corporate messaging. Lately, our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed. And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think.
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Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I heard only the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. I saw no advertisements on the walls. This silence, more than any other feature, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious. When you step inside and the automatic doors whoosh shut behind you, the difference is nearly tactile, like slipping out of haircloth into satin. Your brow unfurrows, your neck muscles relax; after 20 minutes you no longer feel exhausted.

Outside, in the peon section, is the usual airport cacophony. Because we have allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want yours back you’re going to have to pay for it.
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I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested.

Hear, Hear.

"We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls," Mother Theresa

February 19, 2015

"The goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism"

At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.

A draft document out of Geneva gives details of the UN plan to rule the world….The purpose of the latter conference was to produce the negotiating text for the climate conference to be held in Paris in December. The Geneva meeting was conducted in a rush with no opening statements, even by the head of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres. Ms. Figueres expectation of the climate treaty coming is that it will be “a centralised transformation” that “is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different”.

February 8, 2015

"One who desires power will suppress the truth in a blink in order to secure it."
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Kevin O'Brien on Jean-Luc Marion's The Erotic Phenomenon wrote "Marion defines ideology as love of power defeating love of truth. An ideology is thus a parody of a philosophy, for one who desires power will suppress the truth in a blink in order to secure it."

Doesn't that explain a lot in the world today, especially with respect to Global Warming. It's called scientific fraud.

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.
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Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline.
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One of the more provocative points arising from the debate over those claims that 2014 was “the hottest year evah” came from the Canadian academic Dr Timothy Ball when, in a recent post on WUWT, he used the evidence of ice-core data to argue that the Earth’s recent temperatures rank in the lowest 3 per cent of all those recorded since the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In reality, the implications of such distortions of the data go much further than just representing one of the most bizarre aberrations in the history of science. The fact that our politicians have fallen for all this scary chicanery has given Britain the most suicidally crazy energy policy (useless windmills and all) of any country in the world.

As the Earth warms, the amount of rain or snow falling in the heaviest one percent of storms has risen nearly 20 percent on average in the United States—almost three times the rate of increase in total precipitation between 1958 and 2007.

Look what these UCS crooks did. They cherry picked starting their graph at the minimum during the drought of the late 1950’s, because the earlier years wrecked their claim. So they simply threw the other data out. This is blatant fraud by an organization calling themselves scientists.

But what he wants people to understand is that climate change researchers and politicians collude to create fear of a disaster that will never happen. - climate cycles overlap with election cycles, which helps politicians “get electoral visibility by pounding the panic drums.”

“You will never read or hear any of this from the scientific and political establishments,” Dr. Terry Hughes, professor emeritus of earth sciences and climate change at the University of Maine, told The College Fix. “I’m now retired, so I have no scientific career to protect by spreading lies.”

He said he thinks dire global warming predictions are really all about lassoing federal research funding and votes.

“Too many (the majority) of climate research scientists are quite willing to prostitute their science by giving these politicians what they want,” the glaciologist added.

His reasons for why global warming is a good thing, Hughes told the Capital Journal, is that “atmospheric CO2 would greatly increase agricultural production,” “thawing permafrost would increase by one-seventh Earth’s landmass open to extensive human habitation,” and “if the sea level did rise, there would be a global economic boom,” among other arguments.

December 2, 2014

Fabulous news about energy

So it’s really not surprising that the national average for a gallon of gas has fallen to $2.77 this week – in 10 states it was under $2.60 – and analysts predict we’re going to dip below the two-dollar mark soon. U.S. oil is down to $75 a barrel, a drop of more than $30 from the 52-week high.

The Institute for Energy Research estimates that we have enough natural gas in the U.S. to meet electricity needs for around 575 years at current fuel demand and to fuel homes heated by natural gas for 857 years or so – because we have more gas than Russia, Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia combined….

Every warning the Left has peddled about an impending energy crisis over the past 30 to 40 years has turned out to be wrong. And none of them are more wrong than the Malthusian idea that says we’re running out of oil.

September 23, 2014

Science and Climate

Here's one certain sign that something is very wrong with our collective mind: Everybody uses a word, but no one is clear on what the word actually means. One of those words is "science."
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let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That's the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says "science" is something different…..

To most people, capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It is a thing engaged in by people wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands. The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people. In other words — and this is the key thing — when people say "science", what they really mean is magic or truth.
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While it is a fact that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads, all else equal, to higher atmospheric temperatures, the idea that we can predict the impact of global warming — and anti-global warming policies! — 100 years from now is sheer lunacy. But because it is done using math by people with tenure, we are told it is "science" even though by definition it is impossible to run an experiment on the year 2114.
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You might think of science advocate, cultural illiterate, mendacious anti-Catholic propagandist, and possible serial fabulist Neil DeGrasse Tyson and anti-vaccine looney-toon Jenny McCarthy as polar opposites on a pro-science/anti-science spectrum, but in reality they are the two sides of the same coin. Both of them think science is like magic, except one of them is part of the religion and the other isn't.
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It also means that for all our bleating about "science" we live in an astonishingly unscientific and anti-scientific society. We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our "pro-science" people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science).
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Modern science is one of the most important inventions of human civilization. But the reason it took us so long to invent it and the reason we still haven't quite understood what it is 500 years later is it is very hard to be scientific. Not because science is "expensive" but because it requires a fundamental epistemic humility, and humility is the hardest thing to wring out of the bombastic animals we are.

We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy, writes leading scientist Steven E. Koonin who was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama's first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University.

The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.--
The crucial scientific question for policy isn't whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will….

Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole….

A second challenge to "knowing" future climate is today's poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate's heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. ….

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate's response to human and natural influences. But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.

July 23, 2014

Widespread animal mutation

News report from Trenton Times : ‘Intersex’ fish found in Delaware, other rivers a result of hormone-disrupting chemicals……The fish’s endocrine system, which regulates hormones and reproductive systems, is being thrown off by the estrogen and estrogen-like chemicals being dumped into the water through both agricultural and human waste, such as manure and human waste water, along with synthetic chemicals coming from plastics and pharmaceutical chemicals that act like estrogens, such as the ones found in birth control pills.
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If any other chemical was causing widespread and proven mutations in wildlife, the environmentalists would be going ballistic. But from them, not a peep because: seriously, guys: sex! It’s totally worth it!

Peaceful Greens

Former UK Environment Secretary Owen Paterson - recently sacked in Prime Minister David Cameron's reshuffle - said today that he received more death threats from green activists than ever he did from Republican and Loyalist terrorists during his stint as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

The Northern Ireland posting is considered one of the more dangerous jobs in British politics, which is why the incumbent - unlike with most cabinet positions - is automatically given 24-hour armed protection. But according to Paterson, his stint as Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was much more perilous.

I soon realized that the greens and their industrial and bureaucratic allies are used to getting things their own way. I received more death threats in a few months at Defra than I ever did as secretary of state for Northern Ireland. My home address was circulated worldwide with an incitement to trash it; I was burnt in effigy by Greenpeace as I was recovering from an operation to save my eyesight. But I did not set out to be popular with lobbyists and I never forgot that they were not the people I was elected to serve.

Paterson claimed that his address was circulated amongst Green groups with an "incitement to trash it". He also claimed to have been "burnt in effigy by Greenpeace as I was recovering from an operation to save my eyesight". Actions that would have led to arrests had he still been Northern Ireland Secretary.
The former Environment Secretary's central claim was that Green lobby had attacked him for supporting growth in the rural economy. He said that groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace existed merely "to enhance their own income streams and influence by myth making and lobbying".

July 21, 2014

Yankees will freeze in the dark

In the next few years New England will be facing a full-scale power shortage. Last week the governors of the six New England states met in an emergency session at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss what to do about the pending crisis.
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In a hell-bent campaign to rid itself of any form of dirty, messy “non-renewable” energy, New England has been closing down coal and oil plants for the last decade. In 2000, 18 percent of New England’s electricity came from coal and 22 percent from oil. Today it’s 3 percent coal and 1 percent oil. Meanwhile, natural gas — the fuel that everybody loves until you have to drill for it — has risen from 15 percent to a starkly vulnerable 52 percent, just behind California.

There’s only one problem. New England doesn’t have the pipelines to bring in the gas. Nor is anyone going to allowed to build it, either.
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It’s not as if it’s not needed. Last winter, when record low temperatures hit, there just wasn’t enough gas to go around. Utilities that service home heating have long-term contracts and get first dibs. You can’t stockpile gas the way you stockpile coal, so power plant operators were left bidding against each other for what was left. Prices skyrocketed from $4 per mBTU to an unbelievable $79 per mBTU and electricity prices spiked to ten times their normal level.
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New England is now limping along with 33,000 megawatts of electrical capacity, which barely meets its needs. At one auction last winter, the New England Independent Systems Operator, which manages the grid, came up 145 megawatts short — an almost unheard of occurrence. Yet in the next two years the region will be closing down 1/10th of its capacity in a bid to rid itself of anything that does not win favor with environmentalists. First to go will be the last of four coal plants at Salem Harbor, which can no longer meet the EPA’s new regulatory requirements. Next Brayton Point, the largest remaining coal plant, will be retired for the same reason. Finally, a continual barrage of protests and legislative attacks has persuaded Mississippi-based Entergy to close the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Station and “let the Yankees freeze in the dark,” as they used to say in Texas and Louisiana. The reactor provided 75 percent of Vermont’s electricity and 4 percent of the power for the region, carbon-free.

“It’s going to be very tricky for New England over the next three to four years,” says Gordon van Welie, CEO of the Independent Systems Operator of New England, which run the grid.
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So the only “clean energy” left in New England these days is hydroelectricity — generated in Canada. The Canadians are indeed developing huge dams in James Bay and are eager to sell to Americans. But that means building transmission lines down from the north and everyone is opposed to that as well. Northeast Utilities, which services much of New England, has been trying to build a Northern Pass transmission corridor since 2009 but environmental groups insist the lines be buried underground. …….Meanwhile, environmentalists have become so ambitious and well funded that they have bought up land and property rights in northern New Hampshire just to block its path. Plans to bury just eight miles of the 187-mile route have ballooned costs from $200 million to $1.4 billion and the project is years from completion — if ever.

Another cold winter is certain to bring skyrocketing prices and possible brownouts. New Englanders already pay 45 percent higher electric bills than the rest of the country and that figure can only grow. The first region of the country to industrialize is about the drive away the last of its blue-collar workshops.

June 23, 2014

How NOAA has manipulated the truth

Yet another scandal in yet another government agency: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, has been falsifying temperature data. They changed the real, observable temperatures to theoretical ones based on computer models to better suit the 'narrative' of global warming. And they call themselves scientists.

Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records….Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.

In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.
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Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the way it is conducted, you would think that only two positions are possible: that the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is inevitable. In fact there is room for lots of intermediate positions, including the view I hold, which is that man-made climate change is real but not likely to do much harm, let alone prove to be the greatest crisis facing humankind this century

Yes. Horrifying but true. These are the costs to the US economy, by 2100, of the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory war on carbon dioxide, whereby all states must reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity generating plants by 30 per cent below 2005 levels.
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A U.S. Chamber of Commerce study calculates that the new regulations will cost our economy another $51 billion annually, result in 224,000 more lost jobs every year, and cost every American household $3,400 per year in higher prices for energy, food and other necessities. -
….Climatologists "Chip" Knappenberger and Pat Michaels: Using a simple, publically-available, climate model emulator called MAGICC that was in part developed through support of the EPA, we ran the numbers as to how much future temperature rise would be averted by a complete adoption and adherence to the EPA’s new carbon dioxide restrictions*. The answer? Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100. 0.018°C to be exact.

Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).

Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.

There is one thing and one thing only that made the switch away from coal possible: fracking. Without the huge new supplies of natural gas, one of the lowest-emitting fossil fuels, the U.S. would have no feasible way to escape its dependence on King Coal. In other words, for greens to win on coal they have to lose on fracking.

Your typical environmentalist has a deeply ingrained impulse to fight any kind of extractive process aimed at producing any imaginable fossil fuel, and that bias makes it difficult to see the fracking boom for what it really is: an environmental triumph on a scale solar and wind can only dream of. This uncomfortable truth isn’t unusual. For greens to really bend the carbon curve, they will have to lose their war on nuclear power, an effectively zero-emissions energy source.
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Too many greens take their science a la carte. Where scientific research tells greens things they like to hear, greens get all self righteous about “science deniers.” But whenever some poor scientist somewhere attacks a cherished green shibboleth, hordes of vicious and bitter green activists hurl angry accusations about the corruption of the scientific process by corporate interests.

We need solutions grounded in our best understanding of science, and we need to put those into practice. We need fracking, just like we need nuclear, just like we need GMOs. And we need an environmental movement that is realistic, balanced, and committed to the needs of human beings.

So: to save the planet, beat the greens. That is the paradoxical situation green anti-science bigotry puts us in: for green goals to be met, the green movement must often fail.

May 29, 2014

Imagine giving food to the poor using the VA model

Nobody wanted these veterans dead, but dead they are. How is it possible that the government of the United States of America — arguably the most powerful organization of any sort in the history of the human race, in possession of a navy, a nuclear arsenal, and a vast police apparatus — cannot ensure that its own employees and contractors do not negligently kill its other employees and former employees? Never mind providing veterans with world-class medical care — the federal government cannot even prevent bureaucratic homicide
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Ludwig von Mises was developing a complexity-based theory of his own, the famous socialist calculation problem — arguing that, without the information communicated by market prices, economic calculation is not inefficient but impossible, and that the so-called scientific socialists, looking down at their five-year plans and their model villages like an archduke playing with his orrery, could not, in fact, actually do what they purported to want to do: rationally manage industries and national economies.

Markets, the brain, and weather are among the textbook examples of complex systems, and they have something in common: Their behavior cannot be calculated beforehand.
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How confident should we be that our policies will produce the desired outcomes? That will depend in some part on how complex the system is that you are attempting to influence. Housing and mortgage markets are very complex, and politicians’ efforts to turn them to their own ends went very badly in 2008, and will go very badly again in the future. Health-insurance markets and medicine are both very complex, and we see how political efforts to manage those have been going.

Operating hospitals is a complex business, too. Consider a counterexample: Our food-stamp program has many problems, but imagine what a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare it would be if, instead of the current practice of giving poor people vouchers for food, we applied the VA model and attempted to have the government deliver the service itself rather than simply paying for it. That would mean federally operated farms, ranches, and slaughterhouses, government grocery stores, warehouses, distribution centers, transportation networks, etc., all managed with the competence and decency exhibited by the VA. Rather than trying to politically steer the extraordinarily complex system of producing and distributing food — rather than biting off way more than we can cognitively chew — we instead chose the relatively simple method, giving poor people vouchers for food. Of course that has its problems and unintended consequences, but they are milder than, say, national famine, which is probably what would come of government-run agriculture. We let the complex problem of food production meet the complex solution of the market.

Not every regulation or government program is doomed to fail. But we might consider the slightly terrifying possibility that when government does get something right, it does so by accident, temporarily, and for reasons that it cannot understand or replicate. This may be why the sheer volume of law and regulation has been climbing so rapidly: Intuiting its own inefficacy, Washington is throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Entity with Whom politicians sometimes confuse themselves needed only ten commandments, not the ten thousand a year that Washington produces. Some of those coming down in the near future will be intended to reform the VA. The rational thing to do would be to abolish it. We’d be far better off paying veterans’ medical bills out of the Treasury than trying to operate a network of hospitals and clinics. And no matter what Washington promises to do to solve this problem, it is a good bet that the policy enacted will not produce the result intended. Reform is a random walk.

May 27, 2014

Rachel Carson - Truth will out

While Rachel Carson is still a hero to most in the environmentalist movement - below is today's Google home page - more and more people are now admitting how shoddy was her science and how dangerous her legacy. Bad science kills people.

Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy raised substantial anxiety about DDT and led to bans in most of the world and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides. But the fears she raised were based on gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that, if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct. Her observations about DDT have been condemned by many scientists. In the words of Professor Robert H. White-Stevens, an agriculturist and biology professor at Rutgers University, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
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In 1992, San Jose State University entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, a long-time member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, offered a persuasive and comprehensive rebuttal of “Silent Spring.” As he explained in “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” a stunning, point by point refutation, “it simply dawned on me that that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about [pesticides] and that I was being duped along with millions of other Americans.” He demolished Carson’s arguments and assertions, calling attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.
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The legacy of Rachel Carson is that tens of millions of human lives – mostly children in poor, tropical countries – have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors. This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century.

Nearly lost in a sea of hagiographic links, an inconvenient truth can here and there be discerned: Banning DDT caused the avoidable death, by malaria, of at least 50 million human beings, mainly in the developing world. And the collateral damage continues today. As many as 2.7 million die each year of a disease that was on its way to obliteration prior to Carson’s profoundly unscientific campaign to ban a safe and effective insecticide.

DDT doesn't cause cancer. (Carson blamed DDT for something that was actually, later research found, caused by aflatoxin, a toxic by-product of fungi). Nor does it damage bird reproduction. In 1971-72 an EPA judge concluded after seven months and 9,000 pages of testimony:

"DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man… DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man… The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."

In 2006, the WHO tacitly acknowledged its mistake by partially rescinding the ban. "We must take a position based on the science and the data. One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual spraying. Of the dozen or so insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT," said Arata Kochi of WHO.

Do the utterly misleading "extreme scenarios" posited by Rachel Carson remind you of anyone? Prince Charles, maybe? Al Gore? Dr James Hansen? No surprise if they do. Carson's bestselling brand of junk science and misanthropic, anti-capitalist doom-mongering has provided the model for the international green movement ever since.

March 19, 2014

"The government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine"

The government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP. What's more, the cost of these direct payments is exploding. Even after adjusting for inflation, they've shot up 29% under Obama.

The biggest chunk, 38.6%, goes to pay health bills, either through Medicare, Medicaid or ObamaCare. A third goes out in the form of Social Security checks. Only 21% goes toward poverty programs — or "income security" as it's labeled in the budget — and a mere 5% ends up in the hands of veterans.

So with what's left over everything else has to be cut back, especially the space program and the military. Yet money was found for pet projects. Obama Blew $120 Billion on Global Warming and wants $450 million more in his new budget

All Andy Johnson wanted to do was build a stock pond on his sprawling eight-acre Wyoming farm. He and his wife Katie spent hours constructing it, filling it with crystal-clear water, and bringing in brook and brown trout, ducks and geese. It was a place where his horses could drink and graze, and a private playground for his three children.

But instead of enjoying the fruits of his labor, the Wyoming welder says he was harangued by the federal government, stuck in what he calls a petty power play by the Environmental Protection Agency. He claims the agency is now threatening him with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $75,000-a-day fine. …

The government says he violated the Clean Water Act by building a dam on a creek without a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. Further, the EPA claims that material from his pond is being discharged into other waterways. Johnson says he built a stock pond — a man-made pond meant to attract wildlife — which is exempt from Clean Water Act regulations.

The property owner says he followed the state rules for a stock pond when he built it in 2012 and has an April 4-dated letter from the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office to prove it. …

But the EPA isn’t backing down and argues they have final say over the issue. They also say Johnson needs to restore the land or face the fines.

NB. The EPA only has authority to regulate "navigable waterways" of the United States but has ceaselessly sought to expand its jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act.

This case is extraordinary. The facts are many and sometimes complex. They include things that normally come only out of Hollywood – coded emails among Donziger and his colleagues describing their private interactions with and machinations directed at judges and a court appointed expert, their payments to a supposedly neutral expert out of a secret account, a lawyer who invited a film crew to innumerable private strategy meetings and even to ex parte meetings with judges, an Ecuadorian judge who claims to have written the multibillion dollar decision but who was so inexperienced and uncomfortable with civil cases that he had someone else (a former judge who had been removed from the bench) draft some civil decisions for him, an 18-year old typist who supposedly did Internet research in American, English, and French law for the same judge, who knew only Spanish, and much more. The evidence is voluminous.

Donziger stood personally to make $600 million from the litigation should it prove successful.

Other companies lured to the trough included an investment company called Burford Capital (which planned originally to invest $15 million to help fund the case in return for a 5.545 per cent share of the $9.5 billion proceeds - but pulled out, having only "invested" $4 million, after it smelt a rat); and also the large, left-wing Washington lobbying and law firm Patton Boggs which stood to make hefty contingency fees from the affair - and whose future now may be in jeopardy.

And concludes:

Few corporate entities pump quite so much money into environmental causes as the Big Oil companies - Shell sponsored the Guardian's environment pages; BP invested heavily in renewables as part of its Beyond Petroleum rebranding under the card-carrying greenie CEO Lord Browne - because for years they have been running scared of the green movement, because they're big enough to wear the additional costs of green regulation and because it suits them to "greenwash" their image…..

This is why we should all be applauding the decision by Chevron's CEO John S Watson ... to fight this case. It represents a victory not just for the Chevron shareholder, but for all those who believe in the capitalist system and are sick and tired the way so rarely it seems prepared to grow a pair and stand up for itself.

For too long it has been held hostage by a minority of hard left, deep green activists whose anti-capitalist agenda has been given a veneer of respectability by the intervention of high end law firms, glossy environmental consultancies, Hollywood campaigners, "caring" grassroots pressure groups, expert scientific witnesses, "independent" moviemakers and sympathetic mainstream media coverage.

It happens all the time, all around the world, and usually they get away with it. This time they didn't. The good guys fought back - and won.

February 20, 2014

"Orchards with trees lying on their sides, as if shot."

"The farms in and around Mendota are dying of thirst. The signs are everywhere. Orchards with trees lying on their sides, as if shot. Former farm fields given over to tumbleweeds. Land and cattle for sale, cheap."

February 18, 2014

Where almost half of the country's lakes were dead and dying, unable to sustain life

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain was finally lifted to expose the inner workings of communism to Western eyes, one of the more shocking discoveries was the nightmarish scale of environmental destruction. The statistics for East Germany alone tell a horrific tale: at the time of its reunification with West Germany an estimated 42 percent of moving water and 24 percent of still waters were so polluted that they could not be used to process drinking water, almost half of the country’s lakes were considered dead or dying and unable to sustain fish or other forms of life, and only one-third of industrial sewage along with half of domestic sewage received treatment.

February 13, 2014

Shades of Lysenko in the Trial of the Century:

Trofim Lysenko was the Soviet scientist who ingratiated himself to Joseph Stalin and got his crackpot theories on genetics installed as official dogma, effectively killing the study of biology in the Soviet Union. Under Lysenko, the state had an established and official scientific doctrine, and you risked persecution if you questioned it. Mann's libel suit is an attempt to establish that same principle here.
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Mann has recently declared himself to be both a scientist and a political activist. But in attempting to intimidate his critics and suppress free debate on global warming, he is violating the fundamental rules of both science and politics.If it is a sin to doubt, then there is no science. If it is a crime to dissent, then there is no politics.

Mann vs. Steyn may be the trial of the century. It may determine, not merely whether the environmentalists can shut down industrial civilization, but whether they can shut down the independent thinking of skeptical dissidents.

From Wikipedia

Lysenkoism was the centralized political control exercised over genetics and agriculture by Trofim Lysenko and his followers. Lysenko was the director of the Soviet Union's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenkoism began in the late 1920s and formally ended in 1964.

Lysenkoism was built on theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics that Lysenko named "Michurinism". These theories depart from accepted evolutionary theory and Mendelian inheritance.

Lysenkoism is used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.

January 30, 2014

The California Drought

In some districts, the wells are running dry while other reservoirs are nearly empty.
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Some districts have long-running problems that began before the drought. Larger communities like Santa Clara Valley however, have fared better because of long-running conservation programs.

So far this year, Cal Fire has responded to more than 400 wildfires that have burned more than 1,000 acres. The five-year average for this time of year is 70 fires and 130 acres.

California is the nation’s leader in dairy cows, and fourth overall in the U.S. for total number of cattle, trailing Texas, Nebraska and Kansas, Now ranchers are selling their cattle because there's no grass and little water.

“The president called me today. He offered to do whatever he can do. He obviously can’t make it rain,” he said. “But there are some parts of California that are more privileged from the point of view of water availability than others. So we have systems. We can transfer it. But there are a lot of water rights, a lot of rules, so we’ve got to cut through that and make sure that those who need it most get the water to the extent we have it available.”

This map shows just how bad the drought is today and how badly the Central Valley has been impacted.

Local water districts that supply southern California, the Bay Area and the southern San Joaquin Valley may receive only 5% of their contractual allocations this year while growers in the heart of the valley might be cut off completely. Supplies for residents north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta could be sharply restricted for the first time.
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Suffering the most are farmers south of the delta whose water allocations have plunged over the last two decades due to endangered-species protections. According to the Western Growers Association, up to 4.4 million acre-feet of water is diverted annually to environmental uses like wildlife refuges and salmon restoration. That's enough to sustain 4.4 million families, irrigate 1.1 million acres of land and grow more than 100 million tons of grapes.

Farmers are having to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres and pump groundwater, which depletes aquifers and can cause land subsidence. One irony here is that environmentalists are destroying one of FDR's great public-works programs—irrigating the naturally arid San Joaquin Valley.
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California's biggest water hog is the three-inch smelt, which can divert up to one million acre-feet in a wet year. In 2008, federal regulators at the prodding of green groups restricted water exports south to protect the smelt, which have a suicidal tendency to swim into the delta's pumps. While wildlife refuges have continued to receive all 400,000 acre-feet of water they're entitled to under environmental regulations, farmers haven't gotten 100% of their water allocations since 2006. Even during years of heavy precipitation, federal regulators have supplied growers with 45% to 80% of their contractual deliveries.

More on the Green DroughtFor the sake of the smelt, California farmland lies fallow.

“Factory” is a good word to describe California’s San Joaquin Valley. But “laboratory” might be a little better, for the region is an agri-tinkerer’s delight. The soil being uncharacteristically fertile and the summers being long and dry, growers are afforded that most valuable of things: control. Emancipated from Gaia’s caprice, farmers here can determine precisely not only how much water they wish to provide to their crops but when to add it, too. Which is to say that, in the Central Valley, irrigation is achieved not by the whimsy of the sky but by deliberately placed pipes, pumps, and microprocessors. It is here that the ancient earth meets the best of technology; where Silicon Valley meshes with the baser elements and, together, they yield life. …. This place is a miracle — a vast greenhouse in which, unmolested by the elements and provided with incomparably fecund terrain, farmers can do their thing as never before.

Just under 13 percent of all agricultural production in the United States takes place in the region, which the locals refer to proudly as “the Food Basket of the World”
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Suddenly, as if crossing a line of demarcation — I am reminded of Checkpoint Charlie, the gate that linked West and East Berlin — we leave healthy fields bursting with life, and we arrive at . . . well, we arrive at nothing: just dust, quiet, and a few pieces of unused farming equipment. It’s quite the shift: a real-life Before and After comparison. And sadly, most of the farm looks like this. Some 9,000 of Harris’s 15,000 acres are fallow — devoid of water and therefore of crops and of workers and of attention. “Uncertainty is the new normal,” CEO John Harris sighs from the driver’s seat, his smile disappearing. “This is no way to run anything.”
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That the drought is making planning all but impossible is a refrain I hear all across the region.
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The Central Valley’s woes began in earnest in 2007, when the hardline Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) won a lawsuit against California’s intricate water-delivery system, sending farmers like John Harris into a tailspin. In court, the NRDC’s lawyers contended that the vast pumps that help to funnel water from the reservoirs up in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta down to the Central Valley, to Southern California, and to the Bay Area were sucking in and shredding an unacceptable number of smelt — and, the smelt being protected by the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since 1994, that this was illegal.---
In 2007, the pumps were turned down; the Delta’s water output was lowered dramatically, contingent now upon the interests of a fish; and the farms that rely on the system in order to grow their crops were thrown into veritable chaos. Predictably, a man-made drought began.

This is a classic tale of activist government run amok — and, too, of the peculiarly suicidal instincts that rich and educated societies exhibit when they reach maturity.
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Driving out of Harris Ranch after my tour, I am met by a string of protest signs that have been erected by a neighboring farmer. “STOP THE CONGRESS CREATED DUST BOWL!” one reads. “NO WATER = NO JOBS!” says another. A third has some choice words for Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer. The farmers here are frustrated, of course. But their unease is nothing compared with that of their workers….

“Seeing what having no water in this valley did to our communities in 2009,” Gutierrez tells me, “I had to get involved. It was devastating: The unemployment rate was 45 percent; people were standing in food lines. It had a terrifying impact…..“People think of rich farmers,” Gutierrez continues, “but they don’t think about the people who actually work on these farms.”
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It is a choice that will be difficult to unmake. Suing is futile. … Because the ESA holds that researchers can declare their work private property, scientists must release only their findings and may keep their data and methods secret. Even when the work has been made public, the government’s case has been flimsy at best.
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Of all our present troubles, California’s farming woes are perhaps the most inexplicably sourced and the most easily fixed. Complacently convinced of their infallibility, legislators in the nation’s richest state have prostrated themselves at the feet of many silly ideas in recent years. But for authorities to have put the livelihood of millions of citizens at the mercy of a tiny little fish is almost too much to bear.

December 16, 2013

Globe Cooling Not Warming

Five years ago Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years. Gore made the prediction to a German audience in 2008. He told them that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.”

He wasn't the only one. The BBC reported in 2007 that global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013

Researchers have discovered a chain of smoldering active volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet — which happens to be the ice sheet that climate hysterics say is proof of man-caused global warming.
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If West Antarctic ice melt were caused by man-induced climate change, why is the rest of the continent gaining ice? In fact, while the alarmists obsess about ice sheets breaking off, Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record-large extent for a second straight year.

In 2013, the ice extent reached 19.51 million square kilometers, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center website. That number topped the record-high level set in 2012 of 19.48 million square kilometers.

Four of nine-person Climate Change Committee, official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.

Other industries would stand accused of damning conflicts of interest but when it comes to global warming, anything goes…

The Mail on Sunday today reveals the extraordinary web of political and financial interests creating dozens of eco-millionaires from green levies on household energy bills. A three-month investigation shows that some of the most outspoken campaigners who demand that consumers pay the colossal price of shifting to renewable energy are also getting rich from their efforts.

December 12, 2013

The Damage Caused by Green Policies

A recent article by Vice author Lex Berko notes that dead birds are being found with "singed wings" around several California solar energy facilities.
It happens that many of California's solar plants are, the article claims, in the path of "the four major north-to-south trajectories for migratory birds" called "the Pacific Flyway."

Birds are dying in one of two ways. In some cases, they imagine the shining solar panels to be bodies of water and dive straight into them. There they die when they smash into the panels from the sky. Others "feel the wrath of the harnessed sunlight." The ultra polished solar mirrors bounce sunrays strong enough to burn the feathers off birds that quickly crash to the ground, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Many of the fowl dying as a result of their unfortunate flight paths over solar facilities are birds protected by the federal government under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

The president of the American Bird Conservancy, Mike Parr, said the tally was "an alarming and concerning finding."

A trade group, the American Wind Energy Association, said in a statement that the figure was much lower than other causes of eagle deaths. The group said it was working with the government and conservation groups to find ways to reduce eagle casualties.

Still, the scientists said their figure is likely to be "substantially" underestimated, since companies report eagle deaths voluntarily and only a fraction of those included in their total were discovered during searches for dead birds by wind-energy companies. The study also excluded the deadliest place in the country for eagles, a cluster of wind farms in a northern California area known as Altamont Pass. Wind farms built there decades ago kill more than 60 per year.

I remember the tens of millions of dollars spent to save the bald eagle in a program run by the Fish and Wildlife service that was so successful the bald eagle 'graduated' after 30 years from the federally protected species list.

In the US, according to some estimates, wind turbines are responsible for slaughtering between 13,000,000 and 39,000,000 birds and bats every year. And no, that is not a misprint.
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whenever I write about the astonishing bird and bat morbidity rates resulting from wind farms, some greenie smartass will always come back with the line: "And you know how many birds and bats are killed every year by cats? How many by cars? How many flying into office buildings? You gonna ban those too?"

But there's a difference. Cats make nice pets. Office buildings are useful for working in? Cars get you places.

Wind farms on the other hand achieve absolutely zilch, other than allowing a subsidized few to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, while despoiling the view for miles around.

the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and contaminated water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have been converted on Obama's watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, polluted rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive.

Don't forget how it's increased food prices all over the world leaving millions on the brink of starvation

October 23, 2013

Among the Benefits of Global Warming -Bigger and Better Crops

The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change found that while many studies focus on the costs of rising carbon emissions, few studies focused on whether or not more carbon in the atmosphere could be beneficial to society.

In fact, the Obama administration recently raised its social-cost-of-carbon estimate from $21 per metric ton to $35 per metric ton to the ire of global warming skeptics and Republicans. The estimate reflects how much each ton of carbon emitted costs the U.S. economy.

The number was disputed by economists who argue that there is “little science” behind the estimate and it is politically malleable.
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The center’s study focused on benefits to global food production because higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been shown to stimulate plant productivity and growth, as well as increasing plant’s water conserving and stress-alleviating abilities.

“The results indicate that the annual total monetary value of this benefit grew from about $20 billion in 1961 to over $160 billion by 2011, amounting to a total sum of $3.5 trillion over the 50-year period 1961-2011,” reads the study. “Projecting the monetary value of this positive externality forward in time reveals it will likely bestow an additional $11.6 trillion on crop production between now and 2050.”

“It is clear from the material presented in this report that the modern rise in the air’s CO2 content is providing a tremendous economic benefit to global crop production,” the study adds.

Heartbreak is worse in the digital age because the history of the relationship lingers in photographs and messages posted on social networking websites, researchers claim…. The pervasiveness of content stored on computers, tablets and mobile phones "creates problems during a break-up" because the reminders of their relationship are ever-present.

Here we have the older workers, hobbling to the finish line, but unable to end the race. And here we have young workers, itching to get started, and they can't because there are no jobs, or no middle class jobs, for them.

And the one thing that would cause the many older workers who have saved for retirement to be able to leave the workforce, and clear the way for those frustrated younger workers, is guaranteed medical care.
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If you really and truly want to make a dent in the persistent employment problem facing younger workers, allow anyone age 55 or above to buy into Medicare. Charge them annual premiums equal to what they would have to pay into Medicare at their same wage or salary until age 65 if they continued to work.

The pepper trade was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, the enslavement of countless others, the establishment of the opium trade in India and the extinction of the dodo…..Columbus didn't sail from Spain looking for Ohio; he was seeking the Far East and its spices, i.e., pepper

The 19.7 million new STIs in 2008 vastly outpaced the new jobs and college graduates created in the United States that year or any other year on record, according to government data. The competition was not close.

May 14, 2013

Double Standards

Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country's windfarms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin.

Each death is federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines. No wind energy company has been prosecuted, even those that repeatedly flout the law.
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"What it boils down to is this: If you electrocute an eagle, that is bad, but if you chop it to pieces, that is OK," said Tim Eicher, a former US Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agent.
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Meanwhile, the Obama administration has proposed a rule that would give wind-energy companies potentially decades of shelter from prosecution for killing eagles. The regulation is currently under review at the White House.

The proposal, made at the urging of the wind-energy industry, would allow companies to apply for 30-year permits to kill a set number of bald or golden eagles. Previously, companies were only eligible for five-year permits.

April 15, 2013

Seals, an environmental success story

Though once rarely seen at Cape Cod, their population has been booming due to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

Fishermen are not happy.

'It's like having 15,000 unregulated fishermen, do-what-you-want fishermen out there,' Chatham fisherman John Our, who worked as a commercial fisherman for 32 years, told the Cape Cod Times in 2012.
'This summer, they have been very aggressive,' he said. 'They can eat up 3,000 pound of skates overnight.'
They also easily destroyed expensive fishing equipment and nets.

April 11, 2013

"The theory that explains everything explains nothing.'

Global warming is not so much a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification as it is a political ideology that must be fiercely defended in defiance of every fact to the contrary. In the past few years we have been told that not only hot weather but cold weather is caused by global warming. The blizzards that struck the east coast of the US in 2010 were attributed to global warming. Every weather event–hot, cold, wet or dry–is said to be caused by global warming. The theory that explains everything explains nothing.
David Deming, Professor of Arts & Sciences at the University of Oklahoma via Bookworm

April 9, 2013

How are you going to keep them down on the farm ...

That could be the case, since Paris City Hall this week installed a small flock of sheep to mow the lawn at the city's gardens, replacing gas-guzzling lawnmowers.
Four woolly ewes - shipped in from an island off the Brittany coast - are currently munching the grass surrounding Paris Archives building. The number of sites doing that could expand from October in and around Paris.

The ovine-operation follows a successful stint last year by two goats that were hired privately by the Louvre to mow the lawn at Tuileries, central Paris' grand 17th-century gardens. Motorless and independent, the four-legged workers contentedly munch day and night - oblivious of the France's strict 35-hour work week. A similar experiment in a park outside Paris even found that sheep droppings were a benefit, bringing swallows back to the area.

"It might sound funny, but animal lawnmowers are ecological as no gasoline is required, and cost half the price of a machine," said Marcel Collet, Paris farm director. "And they're so cute."

Between April and October, the new "park workers" will graze grounds the size of eight tennis-courts in three two-week-long sweeps in a move to promote biodiversity and make the upkeep of the capital's green areas more sustainable - replacing both chemicals and lawn mowers. When out of work, they will be resting back at a farm on the outskirts of Paris.

"For a lawn mowed 24 times a year, there is no biodiversity. When you use animals, the droppings attract insects and the insects bring birds," said Eco Terra president Alain Divo whose company plans and organises eco-pasture projects in French urban areas.

April 5, 2013

Seniors Communing with Nature

Artists Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen have been collaborating on a multimedia project that started in Norway. Website iGNANT introduced us to Eyes as Big as Plates, a photo series featuring seniors (including a few 90-year old parachuters) immersed in the landscape as a play on characters from Norwegian folklore. Organic costumes and headdresses were created with scavenged materials — a poignant suggestion that each subject has embraced their eventual return to the earth.

March 18, 2013

The Greening of the Planet

The Mail on Sunday today presents irrefutable evidence that official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed. The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases

March 10, 2013

Nature knows best

Imagine, shooting 40,000 elephants to prevent the land in Africa from going to desert because scientists thought the land couldn’t sustain them, only to find the effort was for naught and the idea as to why was totally wrong. That alone was a real eye opener.
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I want every one of you, no matter what side of the climate debate you live in, to watch this and experience that light bulb moment as I did. The key here is to understand that desertification is one of the real climate changes we are witnessing as opposed to some the predicted ones we often fight over.

It is one of those seminal moments where I think a bridge has been created in the climate debate, and I hope you’ll seize the moment and embrace it. This video comes with my strongest possible recommendation, because it speaks to a real problem, with real solutions in plain language, while at the same time offering true hope.

Crops could soon be grown in greenhouses the size of skyscrapers in city centres across the country, it has been claimed.

Birds Eye and other food producers are investigating building ‘plantscrapers’, which could accommodate hundreds of storeys worth of crops, in a bid to make farming more economical, sustainable and meet increasing demand.

The ‘vertical farms’ would use an innovative feeding system which nourishes plants with enriched water, therefore cancelling out the need for soil – and the need for food to be grown and harvested in the countryside.
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In Linkoping, Sweden, a 54-metre-high structure (just over half the height of Elizabeth Tower – home of Big Ben – in London) is being built by Swedish firm Plantagon. By 2014, the structure will produce a range of leafy green vegetables, including salad leaves, spinach and mustard greens.

People living in rickety and makeshift shacks in slum areas can wait for years before they can get connected to the electricity or water grids, and the United Nations estimates that 62 per cent of the urban population in Sub-Saharan Africa lives in slums.

With the iShack, the ‘improved shack’, they get a solid dwelling that is fitted with enough solar panels to keep the lights on at night and provide power for important equipment such as mobile phone chargers.
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Windows are placed to maximise air circulation and the sloping roof allows rainwater to be collected.
The walls are insulated with recycled materials, a brick floor helps keep temperatures steady and flame-retardant paint is intended to reduce the risk of fires.

An initiative from researchers at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, an initial grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will build 100 over the next year.

November 26, 2012

Seawater and sunlight

Which makes it all the more remarkable that a group of young brains from Europe, Asia and north America, led by a 33-year-old German former Goldman Sachs banker but inspired by a London theatre lighting engineer of 62, have bought a sizable lump of this unpromising outback territory and built on it an experimental greenhouse which holds the seemingly realistic promise of solving the world's food problems.

Indeed, the work that Sundrop Farms, as they call themselves, are doing in South Australia, and just starting up in Qatar, is beyond the experimental stage. They appear to have pulled off the ultimate something-from-nothing agricultural feat – using the sun to desalinate seawater for irrigation and to heat and cool greenhouses as required, and thence cheaply grow high-quality, pesticide-free vegetables year-round in commercial quantities.

So far, the company has grown tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers by the tone, but the same, proven technology is now almost ready to be extended to magic out, as if from thin air, unlimited quantities of many more crops – and even protein foods such as fish and chicken – but still using no fresh water and close to zero fossil fuels. Salty seawater, it hardly needs explaining, is free in every way and abundant – rather too abundant these days, as our ice caps melt away.

At Sundrop Farms we responsibly grow food in some of the world’s driest regions using abundant and renewable resources – seawater and sunlight – using our proprietary greenhouse technologies. Grow Positive!

October 18, 2012

Green Energy Failures Funded by Obama's Department of Energy

36 companies that have received federal support from taxpayers have either gone bankrupt or are laying off workers and are heading for bankruptcy. This list includes only those companies that received federal money from the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy. The amount of money indicated does not reflect how much was actually received or spent but how much was offered. The amount also does not include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which push the amount of money these companies have received from taxpayers even higher.

Al Gore is about 50 times richer than he was when he left the vice presidency in 2001. According to an Oct. 11 report by The Post’s Carol D. Leonnig, Gore accumulated a Romneyesque $100 million partly through investing in alternative-energy firms subsidized by the Obama administration.
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Consider California’s “net metering” subsidy for solar-panel users. As the New York Times reported in June, the program hugely benefits well-off consumers who can afford to install photovoltaic panels. They get sun power for their homes — plus an excess supply that utilities must buy. Thus utilities must also pay to keep them on the grid. Those costs get passed along to everyone else — including low-income customers.

For a sense of where this may lead, look at Germany, whose crash program to replace nuclear power with wind and solar is boosting electricity rates. Der Spiegel reports that 200,000 long-term unemployed lost power in 2011 because they couldn’t pay their electric bills.

A123 is the fifth prominent clean-energy firm the Obama administration subsidized with loans or grants that has filed for bankruptcy protection, joining solar firms Solyndra and Abound Solar, energy firm Beacon Power, and battery company Ener1.---
As Forbes’s contributor Lara Hoffmans reports, in spite of turning a negative $1 billion ever since its founding in 2001, A123 had received $249 million in 2009 as part of the stimulus bill as well as another $125 million in tax credits from the state of Michigan. Also, “[t]o ensure there was a market for A123’s batteries, American taxpayers (some of them unwittingly, some unwillingly) gave Fisker Automotive a $529 million loan to make cars that would use said batteries,”Hoffmans explains.
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The claim made by DOE that encouraging investment in green technology would create up to 5 million jobs is unlike to see the light of day. Based on the DOE data, we see that for the 1705 program alone, the $16 billion loan guarantee program created some 2,378 permanent jobs–jobs which are promptly lost when a company goes under.

The promise of 5,000,000 jobs in green technology; the reality 2378 jobs.

August 23, 2012

The bad and the good: Most expensive green jobs ever and the country's largest ecological restoration ever

The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs -- annual operation and maintenance positions -- meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.

At the same time, those green energy projects also created, in the end, about 4,600 “indirect” jobs – positions indirectly supported by the annual operation and maintenance jobs -- which means they cost about $1.9 million each ($9 billion divided by 4,600).

Combined (910 + 4,600 = 5,510), the direct and indirect jobs cost, on average, about $1.63 million each to produce.

Great news! The worst ecological disaster in the history of the United States may be about to be reversed.

The American chestnut tree was once king of the Eastern forest. Its sturdy hardwood, its beautiful shape, and its nourishing nuts aided Americans’ construction, crafts, and cooking for hundreds of years. Tragically, a fungus from Asia killed billions of trees, and only a small number remain today.
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This is true environmentalism in action: conservation restoring the beauty and the riches of the world we have been given

Driving down the Fenway one day in Boston, I caught sight of a tree that looked as if were alight with a thousand candles and It was so beautiful I had to pull over so I could gaze at it for minutes in wonder. I later learned it was an American chestnut tree in bloom and I saw it just as its pollen stalks caught the light of the setting sun.

The experiments are the culmination of decades of research by scientists at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. At the same time, a separate effort was under way to splice the American chestnut with a Chinese version, producing a potentially blight-resistant tree dubbed the "Restoration chestnut." Both efforts have given hope to supporters who want the chestnut to reclaim part of its share of the forest.

"I didn't think they would ever do it," said Kim Steiner, a professor of forest biology at Pennsylvania State University. Now, he said, "I'm sure it's going to happen."
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The American Chestnut Foundation….started planting their new chestnuts—one-sixteenth Chinese and the rest American—in Virginia in 2006. More than 100,000 of the trees are growing across 19 states. with plans for millions more in what the group calls the country's largest ecological restoration effort.
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Returning the chestnut to American forests in large numbers could depend on help from the mining and timber industry. Federal law requires mining companies to restore land they strip through means that include forestation. Chestnuts thrive in the loose, sandy soils left after mining. The chestnut foundation is working with mining and energy companies….

August 21, 2012

Environment Roundup: Failure of the false narratives of doom

[1972] begat “The Limits to Growth,” a book from the Club of Rome, which called itself “a project on the predicament of mankind.” It sold 12 million copies, staggered the New York Times (“one of the most important documents of our age”) and argued that economic growth was doomed by intractable scarcities. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish academic and “skeptical environmentalist,” writing in Foreign Affairs, says it “helped send the world down a path of worrying obsessively about misguided remedies for minor problems while ignoring much greater concerns,” such as poverty, which only economic growth can ameliorate.
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The modelers missed something — human ingenuity in discovering, extracting and innovating.

Surveying the ruins of industrial America Hanson notes elsewhere that “Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit”, raising the interesting possibility that recovering from a nuclear blast may be possible or at least a lot more likely than surviving terminally stupid political projects.
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The worst thing about political crusades is that they manufacture “facts”. That is to say they mass-produce lies. As a now-skeptical environmentalist Fritz Varenholt noted, movements to save the world tend to force the data into the narrative. After a while the public, force fed a diet of press releases, come to believe the narrative is the fact.

“Everyone knows” that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. After all, this is the advice of a multitude of health writers, not to mention authorities like Britain’s National Health Service…….Now the British Medical Journal reports that these claims are “not only nonsense, but thoroughly debunked nonsense.” This has been common knowledge in the medical profession at least since 2002.

The problem is that wind and solar farms just don’t deliver the same amount of continuous electricity compared with nuclear and gas-fired power plants. To match traditional energy sources, grid operators must be able to exactly predict how strong the wind will blow or the sun will shine.

But such an exact prediction is difficult. Even when grid operators are off by just a few percentage points, voltage in the grid slackens. That has no affect on normal household appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and coffee machines. But for high-performance computers, for example, outages lasting even just a millisecond can quickly trigger system failures.

So for every tax dollar that goes to coal, oil and natural gas, wind gets $88 and solar $1,212.

After all the hype and dollars, in 2010 wind and solar combined for 2.3% of electric generation—2.3% for wind and 0% and a rounding error for solar. Renewables contributed 10.3% overall, though 6.2% is hydro. Some "investment."

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Fossil fuels accounted for 78% of U.S. energy production but received only 12.6% of tax incentives.
Renewables accounted for 11% of energy production but received 77% of the tax subsidies—
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Coal, oil, and natural gas industries paid more than $10 billion of taxes in 2009.
Wind and solar are net drains on the Treasury.

August 17, 2012

Environmental Round-up

The Energy Department has just released a report that ought to leave the greens asking: How did we get this so wrong? As the AP reports, the study shows that US carbon emissions have just hit their lowest level in 20 years. How was this reduction achieved? Natural gas:

In a surprising turnaround, the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.

Many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.

Several weeks ago in a remarkable but little-noticed policy directive, the Interior Department announced that it will allow construction permitting on 285,000 acres of public land in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah for solar energy projects. Even more remarkable, Interior said that energy firms can petition Interior to build solar installations "on approximately 19 million acres"—a larger land mass than Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont combined.--
What's surprising is that few if any nature groups are protesting this regulatory rush to approve renewable energy projects. Environmental groups have never hesitated to block a dam to save a snail darter, or oppose a forest-clearing to save an owl, but desert tortoises and bighorn sheep are apparently expendable as sacrifices to the gods of green energy. So much for protecting wildlife from big, bad profit-making industry.

Whereas most of the pressure from environmental groups has been in preventing the development of Western lands, now these seemingly endless tracts are being regarded as a fertile field of dreams for environmentalists to carry on their experiments with wind and solar energy. Early this month, President Obama proudly announced seven major projects on Western lands. The largest will be a 3,000-MW-capacity wind farm covering 350 square miles of Wyoming. The others include a 75-square-mile wind farm in the Mojave Desert of Arizona and several-square-mile solar complexes in California, Arizona, and Nevada

All these projects will suffer the intermittency problems that plague wind and solar generation everywhere. This intermittency will create surges and voltage drops that destabilize a grid. Some solar plants are now developing thermal storage that can carry them through a few hours of the night, but only this reduces their overall capacity by nearly one-half, so that instead of requiring 10 square miles of highly polished mirrors to generate 500 megawatts -- the size of an average coal plant -- it will take twenty. These projects will also require hundreds of miles of transmission lines to bring them to population centers. And the electricity they produce will be ridiculously expensive.

Yet all will move ahead because federal-and-state-sponsored renewable programs are being pursued without any regard for the economic consequences. The electricity they produce will be guaranteed a market at a price that makes them profitable, whatever it may be.

Though you would not know it from wailing and gnashing of teeth over the expiration of the [production tax credit, or] PTC, many states also have renewable energy standards that force ratepayers to buy wind, solar, and biomass produced electricity regardless of how much it costs. These renewable standards are separate from—and, for wind-power producers, in addition to—the PTC.
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A business that cannot survive without taxpayers paying 50 percent of the costs does not help the economy. Instead, it eats up more value than it produces.

August 6, 2012

New study shows half of the global warming in the USA is artificial

If I didn't read British newspapers and James Delingpole, I would never have known that

…the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the US government body in charge of America's temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.

U.S. Temperature trends show a spurious doubling due to NOAA station siting problems and post measurement adjustments.

And then there is the deliciousness of Delingpole's writing

So, in the spirit of magnanimity in total crushing victory I would urge readers of this blog not to crow too much about the devastating blow Watts's findings will have on the Guardian's battalion of environment correspondents, on the New York Times, on NOAA, on Al Gore, on the Prince of Wales, on the Royal Society, on Professor Muller, or on any of the other rent-seekers, grant-grubbers, eco-loons, crony capitalists, junk scientists, UN apparatchiks, EU technocrats, hideous porcine bolsters, demented squawking parrots, life-free loser trolls, paid CACC-amites and True Believers in the Great Global Warming Religion.

The president’s speech calls to mind a second-season West Wing episode, in which speechwriter Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) explains to the staff of some liberal house members why he won’t insert a line in President Bartlet’s upcoming speech. They want the president to attack Republican tax cut proposals as financing “private jets and swimming pools” for the wealthy. As Seaborn argues:

Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, “It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share,” I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid twenty-seven times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of twenty-six other people. And I’m happy to ’cause that’s the only way it’s gonna work, and it’s in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads, but I don’t get twenty-seven votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn’t come to my house twenty-seven times faster and the water doesn’t come out of my faucet twenty-seven times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for twenty-two percent of this country. Let’s not call them names while they’re doing it, is all I’m saying.

The CEO of Peregrine Financial, a futures trading brokerage firm in Iowa, is accused of stealing over $200 million of the customers' money over a 20 year period. This is one mistake that Russ Wasendorf made.

The bigger mistake was trying to commit suicide and leaving notes for his business partners and his wife. That leaves no question he was trying to commit suicide. He made the mistake of hooking his tailpipe exhaust to a hose into his car as his suicide method.

Being a successful CEO he undoubtedly has a new car. In order to asphyxiate yourself with carbon monoxide you must use an automobile dating before 1992. Since then catalytic converters have been so successful that there is not sufficient carbon monoxide to commit suicide.

Ed Driscoll, Reality, What a Concept . For example, what the liberal Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam discovered about ethnic diversity.

...as communities become more ethnically diverse they in fact become socially frayed. In a survey that included interviews with over thirty thousand people, Putnam found that as a community becomes more ethnically and socially varied, social trust plummets. People tend to “hunker down,” in Putnam’s words banding together with a shrunken and shrinking group of friends or alone in front of the TV. Trust in political leaders, the political process, and even voting decline precipitously. Volunteerism, from charitable giving to carpooling, deteriorates. Political activism increases as people look to government to solve problems that once might have been solved by a simple conversation across a coffee table or a shared fence between neighbors.

Note: Putnam did not find that diversity fuels racism; the vast bulk of the people interviewed for the study were not bigots. What he found was that diversity promotes alienation, disengagement, and social isolation. This all runs counter to a host of prevailing clichés and pieties.

Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world's most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as "proof" that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.
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In 2010, we learned that much of what we thought we knew about global warming was compromised and probably false. On June 27, the culprits confessed and promised to do better. But where do we go to get our money back?

June 18, 2012

Nothing scientific about Global Warming

Powerline shows how James Hansen has led every one very wrong on global warming with his widely off the mark predictions

While global warming alarmists cloak themselves in the mantle of science, the truth is that there is nothing scientific about their enterprise. The models that are the sole basis for global warming alarmism have been proved conclusively to be wrong. That really is all that needs to be said about the matter. The fact that alarmists and their supporters in the media and in politics continue to try to foist discredited theories onto the public shows that their real interest is not science, but politics and power.

How off the mark. 150% Take a look at this chart and go to the link for an explanation.

May 30, 2012

Big Green Failing Big Time

Do you know when the last global summit was? Neither do I. The green agenda has been forgotten or disregarded as people realize how fraudulent it is. The prophets of environmental armageddon more than ever seem like Reverend Camping with his predictions of the end of the world and rapture.

Remember when meetings to debate and negotiate an international carbon treaty were big news? The Copenhagen Summit was hailed as the largest assembly of world leaders ever to gather for one event; when it fizzled in waves of shame and confusion, the green movement was shocked and dismayed.
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Those who want to follow the latest stage in the futile march of the global greens can read the BBC dispatch on the global non-summit; the air of despair hanging over the process comes through loud and clear. These are bureaucrats who realize they are becoming so irrelevant that they may soon face the grim possibility of budget cuts: as of now, there are no funds available for the next global green gabfest, tentatively scheduled for Bangkok.

Concern about the climate, we continue to believe at Via Meadia, is not misplaced, but the crazy set of unrealistic objectives, laughable foreign aid boondoggles, Malthusian panic mongering and cockamamie treaty plans made this UN process a clown circus that was doomed to fail — and the sooner, the better. There was a time — as recently as early 2010 — when the Great and the Good, the Champions of the Conventional Wisdom and the Oracles of the Davoisie identified this forlorn negotiation as the wave of the future and the last best hope of man.

Let the futility and failure to which all this led be a reminder to us and to them: those who guide the world’s destiny aren’t nearly as discerning as they think they are. Between the American housing bubble, the European meltdown and the climate disaster, it almost begins to look as if the Establishment consists mostly of overpaid, egotistical blowhards.

As The Examiner’s Brian Hughes reminds us, then-candidate Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs, at the low, low cost of only $15 billion per year:
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Obama spent $90 billion of his stimulus package on green energy projects, including weatherization of buildings and development of electric vehicles. Yet, by the end of last year,just 16,100 people landed new jobs in the so-called green industry, Labor Department statistics show, far short of the 200,000 jobs the White House projected it would help create each year.

Obama has grown very quiet about climate change. He can spot a political loser from a Chicago mile away. He’s not attending the UN’s 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit that started the whole climate diplomacy circus. Twenty years ago the greens browbeat President Bush to attend, which he ultimately did. But the craven greens seem to be giving Obama a pass. As Roll Call reports:

President Barack Obama’s first Earth Day proclamation in 2009 was an urgent call to address global warming. This year? The word “climate” didn’t even get a mention. . .

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Item: In an extremely curious New York Times story last week, Times environmental writer John Broder notes that President Obama pushed hard for the final approval of Shell Oil’s long sought permit to begin drilling in a new offshore oil field in Alaska, which has been held up for years by bureaucratic red tape and environmental lawsuits.

This opening of the frozen frontier to oil exploration is curious because the President nixed the Keystone pipeline for no rational reason simply to please his base. His administration has delayed and delayed to approve new onshore drilling in Alaska threatening the physical viability of the Alaskan pipeline because of declining oil flow.

From Canada to Colombia to Brazil, oil and gas production in the Western Hemisphere is booming, with the United States emerging less dependent on supplies from an unstable Middle East. Central to the new energy equation is the United States itself, which has ramped up production and is now churning out 1.7 million more barrels of oil and liquid fuel per day than in 2005.

“There are new players and drivers in the world,” said Ruben Etcheverry, chief executive of Gas and Oil of Neuquen, a state-owned energy firm that is positioning itself to develop oil and gas fields here in Patagonia. “There is a new geopolitical shift, and those countries that never provided oil and gas can now do so. For the United States, there is a glimmer of the possibility of self-sufficiency.”

Oil, Government Fraud, Kodak and Neighborhood Nuclear Modules

The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday.

“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.

“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves.”

Think of the implications of creating tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of new jobs, of becoming truly energy self reliant, free from troublesome tyrants in the Mideast.

A congressional staffer who has worked to combat fraud at the federal level agreed that the amount of money being spent has stretched the government thin and left limited accountability. A culture has developed that excuses lavish spending programs, he said, pointing to the GSA’s $800,000 Las Vegas retreat, which has resulted in several firings and resignations.

“The federal government is sending all of this money out and there’s no follow up, no accountability,” the staffer said. “It’s part of the culture.”

Kodak's purpose for the reactor wasn't sinister: they used it to check materials for impurities as well as neutron radiography testing. The reactor, a Californium Neutron Flux multiplier (CFX) was acquired in 1974 and loaded with three and a half pounds of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core.

The reactor was installed in a closely guarded, two-foot-thick concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters, where it was fed tests using a pneumatic system. …It wasn't until 2006, well after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that it was decided to dismantle it.

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a kilowatt hour anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. '

The Gen4 Module (formerly the Hyperion Power Module) is a small next generation nuclear power reactor that will not require refueling during its 10-year operational lifetime, as well as no on-site access to nuclear fuel, which reduces safety and proliferation concerns. According to the release, G4M technology has the potential to provide power to undeveloped regions, demonstrate unmatched nuclear safety, as well as provide a cleaner energy source by emitting no greenhouse gasses. The G4M will produce 25 MW of safe and reliable electric power that is manufactured in a factory and transported to the installation site completely sealed. After its useful life it is replaced with an entirely new power module.

May 11, 2012

Life in a Green Paradise

The energy-saving light bulb ends up as hazardous waste, too much insulation promotes mold and household drains are emitting a putrid odor because everyone is saving water. Many of Germany's efforts to protect the environment are a chronic failure, but that's unlikely to change.
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Gone are the days when it was enough for a shower head to simply distribute water. Today an aerosol is generated through a complicated process in the interior of the shower head. The moisture content in the resulting air-water mixture is so low and the air content so high that taking a shower feels more like getting blow-dried.

The government is even teaching our smallest citizens how important it is to treat precious water responsibly. The Environment Ministry's children's website admonishes them to "Think about how you can save water! Taking a shower is better for the environment than taking a bath. Turn off the water when you're soaping yourself. Never let the water run when you're not using it. And maybe you can spend less time in the shower, too."

This is all very well and good, but there's only one problem: It stinks. Our street is filled with the stench of decay. It's especially bad in the summer, when half of Berlin is under a cloud of gas.
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WATER. ...Our consumption has declined so much that there is not enough water going through the pipes to wash away fecal matter, urine and food waste, causing blockages. The inert brown sludge sloshes back and forth in the pipes, which are now much too big, releasing its full aroma.

The water authorities are trying to offset the stench with odor filters and perfumed gels that come in lavender, citrus and spruce scents. But toxic heavy metals like copper, nickel and lead are also accumulating in the sewage system. Sulfuric acid is corroding the pipes, causing steel to rust and concrete to crumble. It's a problem that no amount of deodorant can solve.

The waterworks must now periodically flush their pipes and conduits. The water we save with our low-flow toilets is simply being pumped directly through hoses into the sewage system below. On some days, an additional half a million cubic meters of tap water is run through the Berlin drainage system to ensure what officials call the "necessary flow rate."

Germany has a lot of water. It has many rivers and lakes. The amount of rain that falls from the skies over Germany is five times as much as the entire water requirements of the entire population and industry. Less than 3 percent of the country's water reserves would be enough to supply all households.--
LIGHT…Mercury is a dangerous substance. It evaporates at room temperature. Even small amounts can damage the liver, lungs and brain. Paracelsus, the famous physician, inadvertently killed himself with mercury. Since then, doctors have advised against inhaling it.

This makes the renaissance of the toxic heavy metal in our homes all the more astonishing. Like all good Europeans, we are in the process of replacing our old light bulbs with modern energy-saving light bulbs. This is what the European Commission has decreed. The fact that each of these new light bulbs contains up to five milligrams of mercury is seen as a necessary evil, because they consume less electricity than conventional light bulbs.
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Scientists with the German Federal Environment Agency have done tests to determine how dangerous energy-saving light bulbs are. They broke bulbs from the product line of a European brand-name manufacturer. Then they measured the concentration of toxic materials in the air of the room, once after five minutes and a second time after five hours.

All readings were well above permissible levels. In some cases, the mercury level was 20 times as high as the benchmark value. Even after five hours, there was still so much mercury in the air that it would have endangered the health of pregnant women, young children and sensitive individuals.

Because of the mercury, throwing broken energy-saving light bulbs into the ordinary trash is of course prohibited. A waste disposal company from Nuremberg in southern Germany has invented a machine that carefully cuts apart each light bulb and sucks out the fluorescent material and mercury. The mixture is then packed into airtight bags and filled into blue, 300-kilogram barrels. The barrels are loaded onto a truck and taken to a former salt mine in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Thus, the energy-saving light bulb ends up in an underground waste depot, where it will remain forever as contaminated waste.

Scientists revolt at NASA

When Chris Kraft, the man who presided over NASA’s finest hour, and the engineering miracle of saving Apollo 13 speaks, people listen.

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From the joint letter to NASA Administrator

49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.
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Select excerpts from the letter:

“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”

“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated.”

“We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject.”

Science is never settled when scientists look to discover truth. If someone says "the science is settled" they have forsaken truth to promote an agenda.

January 30, 2012

"The mercury vapor in CFLs is at a much more dangerous concentration than anything coming out of power plants'

"I'm not backing down from protecting our kids from mercury pollution," said President Obama in his state of the union address.

Trace amounts of mercury from coal-fired power-plant emissions affect a small number of Americans, chiefly those who live near the emissions sources. At the same time, however, the Obama administration has been trying to force Americans to accept even greater mercury risks by insisting that traditional incandescent light bulbs be replaced with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs).

The mercury vapor in CFLs is at a much more dangerous concentration than anything coming out of power plants. The associated risks are magnified because the toxic vapors and dust from a broken bulb would be contained in a room or enclosed area. The same EPA that is sounding the alarm about mercury emissions from power plants has written a detailed guide explaining how to respond to a broken CFL. It involves, among other things, evacuating the room in which the breakage occurs, shutting down central heating and air conditioning, airing out the room, carefully collecting bulb fragments and dust with rolled up duct tape, and placing all cleanup materials in airtight bags in a protected area outdoors pending proper disposal. Who knew that dropping a light bulb would instantly turn a home into a HAZMAT zone?

January 27, 2012

When Stubborn Facts Pummel "Post-Normal" Science

I was so happy to see this in the Wall Street Journal today. It means the return of real science and the decline of post-normal science

Once there was modern science, which was hard work; now we have postmodern science, where the quest for real, absolute truth is outdated, and "science" is a wax nose that can be twisted in any direction to underpin the latest lying narrative in the pursuit of power.

There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy.
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The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.--
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause
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The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth.
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Why is there so much passion about global warming, ... There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet.--
Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris;
J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting;
Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University;
Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society;
Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences;
William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton;
Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.;
William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology;
Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT;
James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University;
Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences;
Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne;
Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator;
Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem;
Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service;
Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

January 22, 2012

"National Insanity"

Now consider how Obama's decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder.

Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the U.S., could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.

Finally, Obama's decision forgoes all the project's jobs. There's some dispute over the magnitude. Project sponsor TransCanada claims 20,000, split between construction (13,000) and manufacturing (7,000) of everything from pumps to control equipment.

Apparently, this refers to "job years," meaning one job for one year. If so, the actual number of jobs would be about half that spread over two years. Whatever the figure, it's in the thousands and important in a country hungering for work. And Keystone XL is precisely the sort of infrastructure project that Obama claims to favor.

We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen—with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground—but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality crude—just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more oil to be transported across oceans in tankers.

The environmental impact of the Keystone pipeline has been studied for three years, yet the President said the Republicans were rushing him into a decision within 60 days and that wasn't enough time. Charlotte Hays points out that when it came to showering the politically-connected Solyndra with millions of taxpayer dollars, the Administration couldn't move fast enough.

When it came to TARP and Obamacare, the Administration's urgency was so great, congressmen and senators weren't given time to even read the bills before they were voted on.

January 12, 2012

Government can't even build a solar installation in Death Valley

Where better to set up solar panels than California’s Death Valley? The sun’s always shining and from May to September the temperature doesn’t stray much below a whopping 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yet even in Death Valley government-funded solar projects are floundering. The L.A. Times has the story:
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According to the article, the solar panels in Death Valley have been unplugged for at least two-and-a-half years due to the various agencies tripping over one another.

And in the meantime, one has to wonder: if the wrangling, process crazed bureaucrats wrestling with the conflicting, nonsensical regulations and requirements issued by various state, local and federal bureaucracies can’t work out reasonable solutions to the relatively simple question involved in a no-brain solar installation in the desert, what chance is there that these same bureaucracies will redesign the American energy grid and take us to the low carbon utopia that always seems just out of reach?

December 9, 2011

Bad Faith and Climate Fraud

On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by “Climategate 2.0”, the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.
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While our Government remains trapped in its green dreamworld, similar horror stories pile up on every side, from that UBS report on the astronomically costly fiasco of the EU’s carbon-trading scheme, to our own Government’s “carbon floor price”, in effect a tax on CO2 emissions rising yearly from 2013. This alone will eventually be enough to double the cost of our electricity,and drive a further swathe of what remains of UK industry abroad, because we are the only country in the world to have devised something so idiotic.

... The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.

They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output.
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But although there is now more scientific debate than ever about influences on climate other than CO2, prompted by the fact that the world has not warmed for 15 years, a report from the BBC Trust this year compared climate change sceptics to the conspiracy theorists who blame America for 9/11, and said Britain’s main sceptic think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, should be given no air time.

The latest release of 5,000 emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) reconfirms what the 2009’s “Climategate” files established: Global warming is more fiction than science.
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None of this would matter outside the halls of academia except that this field’s activists have spent years lobbying governments to reorganize whole economies based on the sketchy results of their highly debatable models.
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Collectively, the emails provide evidence of various crimes against the scientific method, such as concealed or destroyed source data, selective measurement, predetermined conclusions, hidden funding sources and bowing to government influence. They knew they were doing wrong and sought to hide the evidence.

There is no understanding environmentalism without also understanding the function of religion as a means of infusing spirituality into the material. The politicization of consumerism is an attempt to mimic the religious dimension of life without a guiding deity.
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The fusion of science and politics gave the left what it had always been lacking. An apocalypse. ..Human apocalypses, wars and revolutions, had been the left's stock in trade. It predicted them and than rallied its followers to come to power so it could ward them off. Environmentalism gave it its own apocalypse. Its old arguments against capitalism depended on the oppressed rising up. Its new argument was that capitalism would destroy the world...

The old left had borrowed social justice from religion, while discarding everything but the moral imperative. The new left combined it with the grandiose spectacle of apocalypses while replacing the deity with the mechanics of consumerism as a vehicle of climate change. What the left created was an irreligious religion with a moral imperative encompassing every aspect of life.--
What the left understood was that a society without religious conviction could be convinced of religious ideas if they were passed off as irreligious ones. A secular priesthood could rise to power by acting as shamans of social justice and protectors of the planet.

One more quote from Chesterton,

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.”

October 10, 2011

Green bankruptcies

Citing Energy’s data, Investor’s Business Daily reports that subsidies for all energy sources averaged $1.65 per megawatt-hour in 2007. Wind and solar: $24. Similarly, while Obama “invests” up to $48.1 million per job, private employers hire the average individual for $58,510 annually, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates.

This entire fiasco helps illustrate what 19th-century French political economist Frederic Bastiat called “that which is seen, and that which is not seen.” While politicians cut ribbons at ceremonies outside green-energy facilities, none will appear at a politically incorrect coal, natural-gas, or petroleum plant that got no loan guarantees — even to create more jobs more cheaply. Far worse, no one sees the companies, products, and jobs that never emerged because Washington politicians vacuumed the pockets of entrepreneurs who might have deployed private capital more productively and innovatively.

....While most free-marketeers would convert these funds to tax relief or debt reduction, only blind liberals cannot see that this extravagance impoverishes their favorite causes.

September 24, 2011

‘The increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind’

‘The increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind’

Award-winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer declared man-made global warming fears “mistaken” and noted that the Earth was currently in a “CO2 famine now.” Happer, who has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, made his remarks during today’s Environment and Public Works Full Committee Hearing entitled “Update on the Latest Global Warming Science.”
“Many people don’t realize that over geological time, we’re really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) – 280 (parts per million - ppm) – that’s unheard of. Most of the time [CO2 levels] have been at least 1000 (ppm) and it’s been quite higher than that,” Happer told the Senate Committee
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“Earth was just fine in those times,” Happer added. “The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started,” Happer explained. Happer also noted that “the number of [skeptical scientists] with the courage to speak out is growing” and he warned “children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science.”

There's a congressional hearing scheduled for Friday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.. Attorneys have advised the committee that ,Solyndra executives will take the fifth. No wonder with possible criminal charges in the future.

Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy — the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans — the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.
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OMB had figured out that there was no economic sense in restructuring: Solyndra was heading for bankruptcy anyway, and an immediate liquidation would net the government a better deal — about $170 million better. The case for leaving things where they stood was so palpable that OMB openly feared “questions will be asked” if DOE proceeded with an unjustifiable restructuring. So, with numbing predictability, the Obama administration proceeded with an unjustifiable restructuring. In exchange for lending some of their own money and thus buying more time, Solyndra officials were given priority over taxpayers with respect to the first $75 million in the event of a bankruptcy — the event all the insiders and government officials could see coming from the start, and that hit the rest of us like a $535 billion thunderbolt last week.

Boondoggles: With a minimum of five green firms going bankrupt, taxpayers find themselves on the hook for at least one possibly illegal loan while paying ghastly sums for each green job created. We've been sunburned.

September 16, 2011

The illusion of green jobs

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.

The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

To date, the DOE has finalized 17 loan guarantees for a range of solar, wind and geothermal projects. The department has issued 15 conditional commitments that must be finalized by the end of September.

The estimated cost of the non-bill is just shy of half a trillion dollars. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that Washington was in the grip of a white-knuckle, clenched-teeth showdown over whether a debt ceiling deal could be reached before the allegedly looming deadline. When the deal was triumphantly unveiled at the eleventh hour, it was revealed that our sober, prudent, fiscally responsible masters had gotten control of the runaway spending and had carved (according to the most optimistic analysis) a whole $7 billion of savings out of the 2012 budget. The president then airily breezes into Congress and in 20 minutes adds another $447 billion to the tab. That’s what meaningful course correction in Washington boils down to: seven billion steps forward, 447 billion steps back.
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On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create 1.9 million new jobs. What kind of jobs are created by this kind of magical thinking? Well, they’re “green jobs” – and, if we know anything about “green jobs,” it’s that they take a lot of green. German taxpayers subsidize “green jobs” in their wind-power industry to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars per worker per year: $250,000 per “green job” would pay for a lot of real jobs, even in the European Union. Last year, it was revealed that the Spanish government paid $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar panel assembly line. I had assumed carelessly that this must be a world record in terms of taxpayer subsidy per fraudulent “green job.” But it turns out those cheapskate Spaniards with their lousy nickel-and-dime “green jobs” subsidy just weren’t thinking big. The Obama administration’s $38.6 billion “clean technology” program was supposed to “create or save” 65,000 jobs. Half the money has been spent – $17.2 billion – and we have 3,545 jobs to show for it. That works out to an impressive $4,851,904.09 per “green job.” A world record! Take that, you loser Spaniards! USA! USA!

Settling the science on global warming

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The study at CERN was held up for 10 years as a result of pressure from the global warming establishment . Even with the successful conclusion of the experiment, CERN doesn't want anyone to know about it.

Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CER

August 24, 2011

"A false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit."

‘The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.’

August 20, 2011

From coast to coast, green jobs agenda a disaster

During the 2008 campaign, candidate Barack Obama said he would create 5 million well-paying "green" jobs within 10 years. Politico has reported that "he's spent considerable time since entering the White House trying to make that happen."

Last week Obama toured to much fanfare a Johnson Controls plant in Michigan where $300 million in conservation grants produced 150 jobs — at a cost of $2 million per position.

Stimulus funds intended to boost the green economy haven't been well spent. The latest example of this is Monday's bankruptcy filing by Evergreen Solar Inc. The Massachusetts company that the White House once said "is hoping to hire 90 to 100 people" thanks to stimulus money has $485.6 million in debt. Evergreen closed a factory in March, reports the Boston Herald, and cut 800 jobs. A Michigan plant is to be shut down, as well, causing the loss of even more jobs.
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Green Vehicles of Salinas, Calif., which has burned through more than $500,000 in money "invested" by the city, folded last month without having produced anything of significance.
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in Seattle,...a $20 million federal grant for home weatherization has, according to KOMO news, retrofitted only three houses and created 14 jobs in more than a year.

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.
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Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show.

The belief that green jobs would drive a new era of American prosperity was — like the large majority of green policy chat — intellectually incoherent. The goods that drive renewable energy industries, like so much else in this world, are far cheaper to construct in Asia.
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Here in particular Senator Obama as he then was would have benefited from a less gushing, more skeptical press. If his first couple of speeches on this topic had been met with the incredulous and even mocking response they deserved, he probably would not have married himself so publicly to so vain and so empty a cause.

August 6, 2011

Faster please

With a little help from genetic engineering, researchers at one Massachusetts company say they've created an organism that takes sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and creates liquid fuel.

Bill Sims, CEO of Cambridge-based Joule Unlimited, says the process utilizes a bacteria, produces a chemical product and secretes it. The result? A fuel that can fill demands for diesel and ethanol.

"The product that we make is diesel. It's very high cetane to very premium diesel. It is fungible, so it's infrastructure compatible," said Sims.

The product can be used in trucks, heavy equipment and further refined into jet fuel. Simply put, the organism created secretes the fuel in a direct process, working faster than current biofuel technology that often uses algae.

Joule’s renewable fuel platform will best the scale, productivities and costs of any known alternative to fossil fuel today, with no use of biomass, arable land or fresh water. Our inputs are sunlight and waste CO2. Our expected output? Millions of gallons of clean, renewable fuel that drops into existing infrastructure. Next step: change the world.

Elk Creek, Neb. (population 112), may not be so tiny much longer. Reports suggest that the southeastern Nebraska hamlet may be sitting on the world’s largest untapped deposit of “rare earth” minerals, which have proved to be indispensable to a slew of high-tech and military applications such as laser pointers, stadium lighting, electric car batteries and sophisticated missile-guidance systems.--
The U.S. has relied on China for years for the 17 minerals that are defined as rare earths by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Despite having such obscure names as praseodymium, promethium and samarium - no copper or zinc here - they are necessary for such routine contemporary technologies as magnets, laser pointers and miniature electronics, such as iPods.
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China has emerged as the world’s predominant supplier, controlling 97 percent of the global market for rare earths. In recent years, lawmakers have expressed concerns about China’s “rare earth” dominance, and these concerns were heightened when Beijing temporarily halted exports to Japan last year during a territorial dispute.

Currently, millions of Filipinos live without any kind of light source at all, but a band of resourceful MIT students have begun changing that. The students found that a one liter plastic bottle filled with bleach water and installed on top of a metal roof is a surprisingly simple way to light homes that have neither electrical connectivity nor natural lighting.The plastic defracts light and pushes it to every corner of a small slum house instead of beaming it onto one area like a typical lamp might. As part of their Solar Bottle Project, the organization Isang Litrong Liwanag, which means “A Liter of Light,” has already installed 10,000 of these ridiculously basic but amazing lamps throughout Manila.

July 27, 2011

"What's the use?"

I was at a public hearing in an inner-city Birmingham neighborhood for various government officials to get public input on some local environmental issues. There are several hot topics, but one of the highest-profile disputes is over a proposal for a coal mine near a river that serves as a source of drinking water for parts of the Birmingham metro area. Mine operators and state environmental officials say the mine can be operated without threatening the water supply. Environmentalists claim it will be a threat.
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After Bryant listened to all of the business-bashing, he finally stood to speak. He sounded a little bit shellshocked, a little bit angry — and a lot frustrated.

My name’s Ronnie Bryant, and I’m a mine operator…. I’ve been issued a [state] permit in the recent past for [waste water] discharge, and after standing in this room today listening to the comments being made by the people…. [pause] Nearly every day without fail — I have a different perspective — men stream to these [mining] operations looking for work in Walker County. They can’t pay their mortgage. They can’t pay their car note. They can’t feed their families. They don’t have health insurance. And as I stand here today, I just … you know … what’s the use?I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I don’t know. I mean, I see these guys — I see them with tears in their eyes — looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So as I stood against the wall here today, basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.

“McElroy comments,

The only thing I’m sure of is that what I saw today is a broken process and a sham. We all want a decent environment in which to live, but when various people at a public meeting — including federal officials and community members — talk about “environmental justice” and make it clear that their intent is to make it harder for businesses to operate, well, I can see why a businessman would decide to quit. I consider myself an environmentalist — because I want to live in a safe, secure, clean world — but what I saw isn’t reasonable concern for the environment as much as it’s an ideological agenda.

... reader after reader talks about how running a small business is a thankless task made impossible by the burden of various regulations. My friends who run small businesses have reported horror stories about the difficulties they face in running a business while jumping through regulatory hoops. We need to find a better balance.

There is hundreds of billions of capital on the sideline not creating jobs because of uncertainty over regulations, taxes and the ability of the government to solve the problems of too much spending and too much debt.

We have left our collective comfort zone. Ideas and institutions that, on the whole, served well since World War II are under a cloud. .... Governments everywhere are striving to protect the old order because they do not understand and fear the new.

Right now it's the uncertainty that is blocking economic growth as Dan Juneau, president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, writes

Uncertainty is the bane of economic recovery. It is the main reason the Great Depression lasted for a decade. It is a major reason why the current economic slump continues. Business owners and investors do not create jobs when they fear factors beyond their control that could impact their profitability. Those factors abound at the moment.

A mammoth government intrusion into health care, rife with mandates and complex government regulations, sits in limbo in the courts. Businesses simply do not know at this point what the impact on their bottom lines will be if the law is upheld. The Obama administration’s energy policies are killing domestic energy jobs while driving energy prices higher for businesses and consumers. The majority of businesses in the U.S. are non-union. Obama’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board continue to try to muscle through pro-union regulations that Congress has refused to enact. Free trade agreements sit idle in Congress, agreements that can expand American exports and create jobs.

The one element that absolutely will reduce the federal budget deficit and the national debt is a rapidly growing economy. That won’t happen as long as our national economic policies put the public sector first, continue to create uncertainty, and throw roadblocks in the path of business investment and job creation. The June employment figures are a testimony to that fact.

July 6, 2011

More destruction of the marine environment

When I first moved into my office at the Department of the interior, there were a number of photographs on the well taken by Department photographers. The one that fascinated me most was a photo of an underwater drilling platform teaming with fish.

The Department of the Interior is now requiring all offshore drilling rigs to decommission and dismantle their rigs when production is completed.

So let’s try this: the most prolific and “diverse marine ecosystem” ever recorded by marine scientists was created by the “facilities” the U.S. Dept. of the Interior is hell-bent on dismantling (offshore oil platforms). Acting as artificial reefs over the past half century, the natural beauty, teeming fish life, coral colonies, and “bio-diversity,” created by these structures is amply documented in several studies commissioned by none other than the U.S. Dept. of the Interior.

One recent report by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Minerals (a division of the U.S. Dept. of the Interior) boasts that “fish densities are 20 to 50 times higher at oil and gas platforms than in nearby Gulf water, and each platform seasonally serves as critical habitat for 10 to 20 thousand fishes.”

In fact, “villainous” Big Oil produces marine life at rates that puts to shame “wondrous” Earth Goddess Gaia. “The fish Biomass around an offshore oil platform is ten times greater per unit area than for natural coral reefs,” found Dr. Charles Wilson of LSU’s Dept. of Oceanography and Coastal Science (emphasis added). ”Ten to thirty thousand adult fish live around an oil production platform in area half the size of a football field.”

Yet endangered coral in the Gulf of Mexico is being blown up, blow-torched, and winched out of the Gulf by the ton to bleach in scrapyards — as mandated by federal regulations. Tons of Red Snapper, Grouper, Amberjack and thousands of other “endangered” or “threatened” fish species are being dynamited in the Gulf of Mexico and left as shark-chum—as mandated by the same federal regulations. Most of these “facilities,” you see, are “dismantled” with explosives detonated around their legs below the Gulf floor. Behold the usual collateral damage here.

“It smells like death here,” said Texas fishing captain Brent Casey about a Gulf coast scrapyard piled with sections of dismantled oil platforms. “I wish you could see these 75-foot piles of metal covered in coral. It’s just insane. Forty years of habitat — gone.”

" This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents"

Gore has the Midas touch in reverse; objects of great value (Nobel prizes, Oscars) turn dull and leaden at his touch. Few celebrity cause leaders have had more or better publicity than Gore has had for his climate advocacy. Hailed by the world press, lionized by the entertainment community and the Global Assemblage of the Great and the Good as incarnated in the Nobel Peace Prize committee, he has nevertheless seen the movement he led flounder from one inglorious defeat to the next. The most recent, failed global climate meeting passed almost unnoticed last week in Bonn; the world has turned its eyes away from the expiring anguish of the Copenhagen agenda.
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But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.
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IBut grave as that danger is, Al Gore can consume more carbon than whole villages in the developing world. He can consume more electricity than most African schools, incur more carbon debt with one trip in a private plane than most of the earth’s toiling billions will pile up in a lifetime — and he doesn’t worry. A father of four, he can lecture the world on the perils of overpopulation. Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption. This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents.

Then Mead takes on the incoherent strategic vision of the Greens inThe Failure of Al Gore Part Two

Gore’s failures are not just about leadership. The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed. That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses.
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The global green treaty movement to outlaw climate change is the most egregious folly to seize the world’s imagination since the Kellog-Briand Pact outlawed war in the late 1920s. The idea that the nations of the earth could agree on an enforceable treaty mandating deep cuts in their output of all greenhouse gasses is absurd. A global treaty to meet Mr. Gore’s policy goals isn’t a treaty: the changes such a treaty requires are so broad and so sweeping that a GGCT is less a treaty than a constitution for global government. Worse, it is a constitution for a global welfare state with trillions of dollars ultimately sent by the taxpayers of rich countries to governments (however feckless, inept, corrupt or tyrannical) in poor ones.
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The dream that the menace of global warming will cause humanity to overcome its ancient divisions and unite in a grand global coalition is sophomoric. Rising CO2 levels will not cause the world’s governments to accept and enforce international policing of the most intimate details of their economic lives. If the menace of nuclear war can’t create world government, the menace of global warming won’t do it either.
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The green movement’s core tactic is not to “hide the decline” or otherwise to cook the books of science. Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science.

What only came to light when the full report was published last week was the peculiar source of this extraordinarily ambitious claim. It was based solely on a paper co-authored last year by an employee of Greenpeace International and something called the European Renewable Energy Council. This Brussels-based body, heavily funded by the EU, lobbies the European Commission on behalf of all the main renewable industries, such as wind and solar. The chief author of the Greenpeace paper, Sven Teske, was also a lead author on Chapter 10 of the IPCC report, which means that the report's headline message came from a full-time environmental activist, supported by a lobby group representing those industries that stand most to benefit financially from its findings.

Earlier this week it emerged that an report [1] on renewable energy for the IPCC had drawn heavily on an earlier paper authored by Greenpeace activist and staffer Sven Tenske, together with a lobby for the renewable energy industry called the European Renewable Energy Council. Tenske ended up as a lead author on the IPCC's report too, and in an astonishing coincidence, ended up making the same recommendations.
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"There is even a commercial conflict of interest here given that the renewables industry stands to be the main beneficiary of any change in government policies based on the IPCC report’s conclusions. Had it been an oil industry intervention which led the IPCC to a particular conclusion, Greenpeace et al would have course have been screaming blue murder," wrote Lynas.
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"[I]f the ‘deniers’ are the only ones standing up for the integrity of the scientific process, and the independence of the IPCC, then I too am a ‘denier

Putting a guy from Greenpeace in charge of writing the supposedly neutral, scientifically-based report on which governments are going to base their energy policy is like putting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in charge of a report entitled Whither Israel?
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Since its very foundation, the IPCC has been a sounding board for green activists. That is indeed its purpose. It has no remit to investigate whether or not climate change is significantly man-made and whether this constitutes a threat serious enough to handicap the global economy with massive tax and regulation because it takes all those as givens: as far as the IPCC’s concerned, the debate is over and the time to act is now. (Which, funnily enough, is exactly what green activists think). This was the point of McKitrick and McIntyre’s brilliant demolition of the Hockey Stick; the point of Climategate; the point of Amazongate, Glaciergate, Africagate et al; the point of Donna Laframboise’s superb research showing how much “grey literature” (ie activist propaganda with no solid scientific basis) from activist groups like WWF and Greenpeace has informed the IPCC’s supposedly state-of-the-art assessment reports.

June 6, 2011

"I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train"

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.
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We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government -how exciting for the political class!

May 5, 2011

Shale Gas can lead a worldwide economic boom

Imagine if we were to discover a new form of cheap, clean energy so abundant that it will provide our needs at least for the next two centuries, freeing us from the pervasive early 21st century neurosis of having to worry about “peak oil” or “conserving scarce resources”, causing a worldwide economic boom and with the added side-benefit of creating more fertiliser so that we can not only heat our homes more cheaply than ever before but also eat more cheaply than ever before.

Imagine how Environmentalists would react if such a miracle came into being.

Actually we don’t need to imagine for the miracle is already here. It’s called Shale Gas and is the subject of a thrilling new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Matt Ridley with a foreword by Professor Freeman Dyson. Neither Ridley nor Dyson is in much doubt that shale gas is the answer to our prayers.

As Dyson puts it in his foreword:

Because of shale gas, the air in Beijing will be cleaned up as the air in London was cleaned up sixty years ago. Because of shale gas, clean air will no longer be a luxury that only rich countries can afford. Because of shale gas, wealth and health will be distributed more equitably over the face of our planet.

And how have the Environmentalists reacted? Why they’re trying to kill the whole thing stone dead, of course.

April 18, 2011

Environmental insanity and fraud

That's what the UN Environment Programme predicted in 2005. How embarrassing is reality? So embarrassing, the UN tried to wipe all evidence of that preposterous claim. Tim Blair has more on the 50 million missing.

In Australia, “A Sydney carbon credits company thought to have been running some of the world’s biggest offsets deals appears to be a fake, shifting paper certificates instead of saving forests and cutting greenhouse emissions.”
How could you tell?

March 28, 2011

Photosynthesis to power your home with artificial leaves

Scientists claim to have found the 'Holy Grail' of science in an artificial leaf that could turn ever British home into its own power station.

The leaf, which is the same size as a playing card, mimics the process of photosynthesis that plants use to convert sunlight and water into energy.

Dr Daniel Nocera, who led the research team, said: 'A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades.

'We believe we have done it.
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Nocera, who is with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that the 'artificial leaf' is not a new concept.

The first artificial leaf was developed more than a decade ago by John Turner of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

Although highly efficient at carrying out photosynthesis, Turner's device was impractical for wider use, as it was composed of rare, expensive metals and was highly unstable — with a lifespan of barely one day.Nocera's new leaf overcomes these problems.

It is made of inexpensive materials that are widely available, works under simple conditions and is highly stable. In laboratory studies, he showed that an artificial leaf prototype could operate continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity.

The key to this breakthrough is Nocera's recent discovery of several powerful new, inexpensive catalysts, made of nickel and cobalt, that are capable of efficiently splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen, under simple conditions.

"Our goal is to make each home its own power station" said Dr. Daniel Nocera

February 28, 2011

Unintended consequences

San Francisco's big push for low-flow toilets has turned into a multimillion-dollar plumbing stink.

Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months.

The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.

Now officials are stocking up on a $14 million, three-year supply of highly concentrated sodium hypochlorite - better known as bleach - to act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city's treated water before it's dumped into the bay. It will also be used to sanitize drinking water.

That translates into 8.5 million pounds of bleach either being poured down city drains or into the drinking water supply every year.

I say let everyone replace their low-flow toilets instead. Most everyone wants to anyway and they will do it if they can and it won't cost the city a dime.

But a couple of recent studies now seem to show that Kyoto was as big a fraud as the most militant enviro-skeptics ever suspected. And it looks as if the 95 American senators were 100 percent right: the much heralded Protocol was a singularly stupid piece of counterproductive social engineering that encouraged the migration of good jobs to China and other low wage countries — without helping the environment at all.

The left leaning Guardian newspaper in Britain let the cat out of the bag yesterday, reporting that while the EU’s emission of CO2 declined by 17% between 1990 and 2010, this apparent progress was bogus. If you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU was responsible for 40% more CO2 in 2010 than in 1990. The EU, as the Guardian puts it, has been outsourcing pollution — and jobs — rather than cutting back on greenhouse gasses.
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Environmentalists will only be able to help the world when they grow up. And they will only grow up when the rest of the world — and especially the mainstream press and serious writers and thinkers — start holding them to serious, grown up standards. Screwy but superficially appealing ideas like the Kyoto Protocol should be mercilessly criticized and all their flawed assumptions and wishful thinking be held up for the whole world to see — when they are first proposed and debated, not after twenty years of uncritical praise ending in failure.

October 11, 2010

Hal Lewis, the Martin Luther of Science

I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

Harold "Hal" Lewis is the Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara and he attacks the American Physical Society of perpetuating the global warming scam and shutting down all debate. Here are excerpts from the letter

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
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How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
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Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.--
This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst.
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Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation.

It has never ceased to amaze how so-called scientists fail to look their own self-interested motives when they shutdown debate particularly on this issue.

October 6, 2010

"Sonic Effluence"

VINALHAVEN, Me. — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on.

Residents living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility in Vinalhaven, Me., say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life unbearable.
Related

“In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.”

Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable.
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Vinalhaven’s wind farm enjoys support among most residents, from ardent supporters of all clean energy to those who simply say the turbines have reduced their power bills.
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But that is cold comfort for Mrs. Lindgren and her neighbors, who say their corner of the island will never be the same.

“I remember the sound of silence so palpable, so merciless in its depths, that you could almost feel your heart stop in sympathy,” she said. “Now we are prisoners of sonic effluence. I grieve for the past.”

October 1, 2010

No Pressure is a repellent eco-video

It is hard to describe how nauseating and loathsome the video No Pressure produced by Richard Curtis with funding from the British government is. It's so bad I don't want to embed it, but you can see it at the link.

Ostensibly the video is supposed to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprints, but unwittingly, it reveals the fascist underbelly of the green movement. The video blows up every one, including school children, who won't go along with the campaign into bloody pulp.

July 21, 2010

The Green Gethsemane

The strategic incompetence exhibited by the climate movement and its congressional allies is something that students everywhere need to study — and especially those who hope someday to help build a better world or fight for social change. This is how you fail, kids: Advance half baked policy ideas by hyping the science to create a global panic; when that fails, fall back on shady little dodges that don’t fool anybody — all the while telling anybody and everybody that you are the smartest, most virtuous person in the room.
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It may be that the Green Gethsemane now unfolding around us will be one of the experiences that stimulates and invigorates new thinking about how civil society movements can work more effectively and intelligently for change.

I hope so. The environment matters; sustaining the diversity and vitality of the beautiful world in which we are privileged to live is one of the two or three most vital challenges before the human race. The greens have been wrong about many things, but about this they are undeniably and courageously right.

July 19, 2010

"The heart of the farming technique was the compost pit"

I found My Grandfather's Earthworm Farm absolutely fascinating and compelling in practicality of the picture of order and harmony with nature it draws when I read it for the first time several years ago. Reading it again, I feel the same awe.
And now enters the earthworm. For more than sixty years these 160 acres had been farmed without a single crop failure. My grandfather was known far and wide for the unequalled excellence of his corn and other grain, and a large part of his surplus was disposed of at top prices for seed purposes. The farm combined general farming and stock raising; my grandfather's hobby, for pleasure and profit, was the breeding and training of fine saddle horses and matched Hambletonian teams. He maintained a herd of about fifty horses, including stud, brood mares, and colts in all stages of development. In addition to horses, he had cattle, sheep, hogs, and a variety of fowl, including a flock of about five hundred chickens which had the run of the barnyard,with a flock of ducks. Usually about three hundred head of stock were wintered. The hired help consisted of three or four men, according to the season, with additional help at rush seasons. This establishment was maintained in prosperity and plenty, and my grandfather attributed his unvarying success as a farmer to his utilization of earthworms in maintaining and rebuilding the fertility of the soil in an unbroken cycle. The heart of the farming technique was the compost pit.

July 12, 2010

Shame on the World Wildlife Fund

If you remember, one of the more alarmist statements of the IPCC in 2007 was that climate change was putting at risk nearly 40% of the Amazon rainforests. There is no peer-reviewed science whatsoever for this statement.

It turns out that one of the most widely publicised statements in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a claim on which tens of billions of dollars could hang – was not based on peer-reviewed science, as repeatedly claimed, but originated solely from anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group.

The ramifications of this discovery stretch in many directions. First, it seems to show that the IPCC – whose reports governments rely on to justify presenting mankind with the largest bill in history – has been in serious breach of its own rules.

Second, it raises hefty question marks over the credibility of the world’s richest and most powerful environmental pressure group, the WWF, credited by the IPCC as the source of its unsupported claim.

To the shame of the World Wildlife Fund, this is the 'science' they cite

.... the WWF finally admitted the precise origin of the IPCC’s much-quoted claim. Fire in the Amazon, it turns out, was not a “report” or a scientific paper but, as the WWF now acknowledges, a “text published by IPAM… on its website in 1999”. It was merely a brief, anonymous and unreferenced note on the exposure of the forest to fire risks, posted in February 1999 and taken down four years later. Here, at last, is the sole source for the statement later published by the IPCC.

Why has the WWF and the Woods Hole Institute clung so tenaciously to this claim?

And third, it focuses attention once more on a bizarre scheme, backed by the UN and promoted by the World Bank, whereby the WWF has been hoping to share in profits estimated at $60 billion, paid for by firms all over the developed world.

They hoped to sell carbon credits, valued at $60 billion, from a vast forest area they would manage with the support of the government in Brazil . They would become even richer than they now are.

June 17, 2010

Phoney iPCC consensus confirmed by IPCC insider

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
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Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

We already knew that but it's good to have it confirmed by such a prominent insider.

June 4, 2010

Vacuum it up

The largest oil spill in history, some 240 million gallons, was a deliberate spill by Saddam Hussein that I never heard of During the 1991 Gulf War, as Iraq retreated from Kuwait, it opened up the valves of oil wells and pipelines to stop the approaching American troops. Cleanup was effected by 25 miles of booms and 21 skimmers who, together with vacuum trucks, recovered some 60 million gallons.

So why has the federal government not employed supertankers and other ships to Vacuum up the Oil? The Anchoress reports

“No one’s listening,” says Nick Pozzi, who was an engineer with Saudi Aramco in the Middle East when he says an accident there in 1993 generated a spill far larger than anything the United States has ever seen.

According to Pozzi, that mishap, kept under wraps for close to two decades and first reported by Esquire, dumped nearly 800 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf, which would make it more than 70 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.

But remarkably, by employing a fleet of empty supertankers to suck crude off the water’s surface, Pozzi’s team was not only able to clean up the spill, but also salvage 85 percent of the oil, he says.

“We took [the oil] out of the water so it would save the environment off the Arabian Gulf, and then we put it into tanks until we could figure out how to clean it,” he told AOL News.

Why are we just now learning that 17 countries offered assistance to help with the spill, but BP has accepted only 2 of them. I understand why the federal government must rely on BP's resources, equipment and expertise to find a solution to this mess, but they don't have to rely on them to clean it up

If the President is in charge, why isn't he and BP, doing more to at least try the vacuuming approach dubbed suck and salvage? Why did it take so long to issue emergency permits so that Louisiana could build sand berms to keep oil from the wetlands? Why isn't the Administration enlisting

May 25, 2010

Governor Jindal willing to go to jail to build sand barriers the federal government won't approve

There's no question that British Petroleum is primarily responsible for the devastating oil spill from the exploded rig in the Gulf of Mexico. I agree that pushing them out of the way makes no sense because you would lose B{'s expertise, equipment and personnel.

But why did the federal government not have an oil spill response plan is beyond me. Why more of the federal government is not involved in beyond me.

President Obama can blame BP all he wants, but the President is the one responsible for not seeing that the federal government provides millions of feet in boom to Louisiana and for not demanding that the Army Corps of Engineers approve an emergency dredging permit for a state plan to dredge and build new barrier islands to keep the oil from reaching marshes and wetlands.

The oil has already hit more than 65 miles of shoreline , and the slick is now as big as Maryland and Delaware combined.
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No one has to look far to see what's at stake. While beaches can be cleaned up, the marshes cannot, and marshes make up the majority of Louisiana's coastline.

Jindal warned that the state's entire shoreline could end up polluted with black sludge if he doesn't get more help, immediately.

"It is clear we don't have the resources we need to protect our coast," the Republican said. "We need more boom, more skimmers, more vacuums, more jack-up barges that are still in short supply. Let's be clear: Every day that this oil sits is one more day that more of our marsh dies."
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Jindal said that oil has seeped as far as 10 miles into some of the state's fragile marshlands, areas teeming with wildlife.

" We don't want oil on one inch of Louisiana's coastline, but we'd much rather fight this oil off of a hard coast, off of an island, off of an island, off of a sandy beach on our coastal islands, rather than having to fight it inside in these wetlands," Gov. Jindal said, making the case for sand booms.

The governor said he has been forced to protect Louisiana without the approval of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is weighing the ecological impact of the construction of more sand booms.

"We are not waiting for them. We are going to build it," Jindal said.

"We can either fight battle -- we can fight this oil -- on the Barrier Islands 15 to 20 miles off of our coast, or we can face it in thousands of miles of fragmented wetlands," Gov. Jindal said, clearing favoring the first option. "Every day we're not given approval on this emergency permit to create more of these sand booms is another day when that choice is made for us, as more and more miles of our shore are hit by oil."

Spanish newspaper La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.

La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: “Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster.”
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The numbers in the long run are even scarier. The government itself says that the alternative energies sector will receive 126 billion euros in the next 25 years. Just an example: The owners of solar plants make 12 times more than what they pay for the energy coming from fossil fuel combustion. The majority are subsidies charged to the consumer.

The conclusion is that with the economy at the point of bankruptcy, it is not possible to keep injecting money in such a costly sector. And the government seems to realize this now.

May 6, 2010

Reaping the Wind

Last week, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar approved the Cape Wind project, the first offshore wind energy project in U.S. coastal waters. Covering 24 square miles, 130 wind turbines will be located 4-11 miles off the south coast of Cape Cod. Cape Wind is expected to supply 75% of the electricity needs of Cape Cod

How much will Cape Wind cost Massachusetts taxpayers? Robert F. Kennedy Jr, an environmental lawyer, said

“It’s a boondoggle of the worst kind. It’s going to cost the people of Massachusetts $4 billion over the next 20 years in extra costs.”

Even if we accept such wildly inaccurate and charitable assumptions, the cost of energy generated by Cape Wind over those twenty years will be over thirty-three cents per kilowatt. That’s more than six times the typical wholesale price for electrons today, around six cents per kilowatt, depending on the market.

Thanks to government subsidies, Massachusetts’ residents won’t have to pay the full price for Cape Wind power. Instead, they’ll only have to fork over four and a half times the going rate

If you really want to understand the futility of wind power, consider the following analysis. In 2007 (the last year for which verified data is currently available) the Department of Energy reported that there were 389 wind-farms producing electricity in the United States, with a net generation capacity of 16,596 megawatts. If all of those windmills were churning out electrons at capacity all of the time, they would have produced a little over 145 million megawatt hours of electricity in 2007. How much did they in fact produce? A little less than 27 million megawatt hours, or less than twenty percent of capacity (also called “capacity factor” in the business).

April 22, 2010

Ecopragmatist

I've always liked Stewart Brand and so I'm ready and eager for the Brand New Green.

The question I ask myself now,” Brand tells us when he gets to nuclear power, is: “What took me so long? I could have looked into the realities of nuclear power many years earlier, if I weren’t so lazy.”
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"Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself.” “Reactor safety is a problem already solved,” and the new reactors are even safer than the old.
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It’s an indubitable historical fact that the developed world was poised to break free from a carbon-centered energy economy 30 years ago. Greens locked us back into it. By demonizing nukes so effectively, they boosted U.S. coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. We would instantly cut our coal consumption in half if we could simply conjure back into existence the 100-plus nuclear plants that were in the pipeline three decades ago. If global warming is a problem, Brand and his ex-friends own it.
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Brand explains that Old Greens are intellectual “hedgehogs”—they start with a grand theory and then shore it up with mounds of factoids dredged up to reinforce what they already believe. “Foxes, on the other hand, are skeptical about grand theories, diffident in their forecasts, and ready to adjust their ideas based on actual events. Hedgehogs don’t notice or care when they’re wrong. Foxes learn. Hedgehogs are great proponents, but foxes are invariably better forecasters and policy makers.”
Peter Huber, the author of the piece, concludes with a quote from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald"

Better late than never, I suppose. But still. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

It is hard to overestimate the damage to the cause of conservation by environmentalists.

March 27, 2010

Cowgate

It is becoming difficult to keep pace with the speed at which the global warming scam is now unravelling. The latest reversal of scientific “consensus” is on livestock and the meat trade as a major cause of global warming – one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to eco-vegetarian cranks. Now a scientific report delivered to the American Chemical Society says it is nonsense. The Washington Times has called it “Cowgate”.
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Week by week the AGW collapse intensifies. Himalayan glaciers, polar bears, Arctic ice, Amazon rainforests, all discredited. Now it turns out the great cow-burp scare is bovine excrement too. The global warming scam is, to the majority of people, an object of derision. The scientific community has also at last wakened up. They are smelling the coffee in more and more institutions these days.
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neutrality, a level playing field and an equal voice is all global warming sceptics have ever asked for. Given those reasonable conditions, the truth will out and we will win. The signs are that a lot of scientists have been moved to assert their integrity, encouraged by the increasingly huge breaches sceptics have made in the defences of the AGW camp. Others may simply have calculated they may have backed a loser and it is time to take out some insurance.

"The decision to include scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate"

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.
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Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate

February 22, 2010

No real science in claims of rising sea levels

In a statement the authors of the paper said: "Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.

"One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes."

There are obviously some opportunity costs lost in the refusal to use our own resources for energy production. Instead of sending billions to Brazil to boost oil production off of their coast, the private sector could invest its own money into leases and extraction. This would create hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs here in the US, as well as reduce our trade deficit. It would provide a more stable bridge towards our shift to replacement energy sources in renewables, while boosting access to cheaper energy in the short run to make the American economy more dynamic. Without it, energy prices will rise much faster than inflation, making our economy more sluggish than necessary.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

Their report provides examples of how the systematic elimination of stations andunexplained adjustments in temperature data caused measured temperatures to rise for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. Many adjustments change what would have been a drop in temperatures into an increase. Take New Zealand, where D’Aleo and Watts note: “About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming.”

“If people knew just how deep and dark this conspiracy is — yes, conspiracy — they’d be amazed,” he explains. “More and more academics are standing up to refute climate-change theories, but it’s still dangerous to do so. It can mean the end of a career, the targeting of someone by well-organized fanatics.”

I rather doubted this man who is arguably Canada’s leading scientific opponent of climate-change fundamentalism until the e-mails poured in after his television appearance. People wrote that he was in the pay of big oil, was a simple high-school geography teacher, was insane and worse. In fact, he is a university academic with impressive graduate degrees and doctorates and, unlike so many global warming advocates, is not in the pay of anybody.
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“I’ve rather got used to it by now,” he says. “At first it was shocking that a climatologist with different ideas was treated like a Holocaust denier. Now I just move on and speak the truth.”

Such aggression has become typical of climate-change fanatics. When they lose arguments or are exposed as frauds, they attack their critics’ reputations or, in the case of the UN climate chief last week, shout that opponents should have their faces rubbed in carcinogenic material. It’s a grander, better financed version of pushing someone off a stage and is as crass and nasty as any anti-Communist witch-hunt

"Climate change fanatics corrupted science"

It had to happen and today the Associated Press has given the American public at large its first good look at a story that has been old news for weeks in countries where the media is more alert.
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For those worried about global warming, the much delayed eruption of this story into the mainstream US press is the best thing that could happen. Denial is the enemy; the more you care about global warming the more you need to insist that the leaders of national and international scientific organizations charged with assessing the evidence and explaining it to the public stick to the highest, most rigorous standards of analysis. Increasing numbers of climate scientists are bringing themselves to say what is now more and more obvious: the leadership of the IPCC has failed this test.

First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government concluded last week that the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit violated the nation's freedom of information act, although the violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.
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As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, "A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority." Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could endanger "up to 40 percent" of the Amazon rainforest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever.
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The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand.

February 1, 2010

The implosion of global warming science and the silence of the American media. UPDATED

While the British papers are chock full of stories about the implosion of global warming science and its grand narrative, there is almost nothing in the mainstream press except for the news Osama Bid Ladin has joined Al Gore in the ranks of the global warmists. Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent.

This is a great story. It has everything a media outlet could desire; scandal, conflict of interest (IPCC head Pauchuri runs companies that benefited from climate scare stories), government cover ups - why then, has this unraveling of the basis of climate science that posited catastrophic man made warming not been making any news at all in the United States?
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As global warming the political movement is losing its scientific justification, the American people - who will be asked to foot the bill to the tune of trillions of dollars if Obama goes ahead with his "green" plans - are grossly uninformed about the state of the debate.

What makes me so mad is that taxpayers as usual are footing the bill for scientists who should be investigated for fraud and, if convicted, jailed. Take, for example, Michael Mann, whose famous hockey stick graph showing runaway global warming, that was later discredited because the data was made up. TARP, the American Recovery Program awarded him $2.4 million. The Wall St Journal called it A case study in one job 'saved'

This scientific scandal is far worse than ENRON ever was. Via James Delingpole, I read Phillip Stott, a British academic, who is foaming with righteous indignation, on the life and imminent death of the AGW scam.
As an independent academic, it has been fascinating to witness the classical collapse of a Grand Narrative, in which social and philosophical theories are being played out before our gaze. It is like watching the Berlin Wall [pictured] being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face - political, economic, and scientific.
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And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato - never mind just climate science - in the public eye for decades

The UN climate panel, the IPCC lied to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising seas and danger to the Amazon rainforest . What are they going to say to the children they terrified with tales of the Amazonian rainforest disappearing by the time they grew up? The UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim reports the London Times. Their claim that global warming would wipe out 40% of the Amazonian rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners with little or no scientific expertise. Shamed indeed.

The head of the UN Climate change panel, Rajenda Pachauri, facing calls to resign, has refused. He got grants through bogus claims. Some of the grants were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Times of London reports.

The good news is All the glaciers that aren't shrinking The Himalayan glaciers are growing, not shrinking. Alaska's Hubbard Glacier is growing. Norwegian glaciers are growing as are glaciers in France, Switzerland, Canada, Mt. St Helens, New Zealand, Russia, Iceland and Argentina.

Roger Simon calls it the politicization of science. And he's absolutely right. This is what happens when people don't care about the truth. Thank God for the Internet.

The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank.

30 years of Global Cooling

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

Even a leading member of the USN's intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Professor Mojib Latif , is doing an about-face.

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’

January 6, 2010

The Headline Poet and Climate Fraudsters

The good news for 2010 is that the climate fraudsters are on the run. The bad news is that they are hoping against hope that the sheriff’s posse won’t catch ‘em. Because the real reason for “global warming” is now clear beyond any reasonable doubt. The reason is ten trillion dollars in taxpayer dough for politicians, transnational bureaucrats, and phony science types. Put away those old world records for the Great Train Robbery and Bernie Madoff. You can junk Bonnie and Clyde. The climate fraudsters have now set the biggest record for massive fraud in human history.
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ten trillion dollars for climate fraud. That’s an official estimate from the “Stern Review ” authored by distinguished British fraudocrat Lord Nicholas Stern in 2006. The same number also comes from the skeptical side, from the Marshall Institute, which has done careful economic projections about the cost of “global warming” abatement.

I agree with Lewis that the most egregious fraudsters should be prosecuted, especially as a deterrent to others.

As for taxing carbon emissions, why? The University of Bristol which actually looked at the observable data instead of using cockamamie software to predict looming disaster while neglecting to account for the sun, the clouds and the oceans in global climate found there has been No rise in atmospheric carbon in 150 years .

A new study shows that Earth's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from all sources, including man, has remained unchanged for 160 years. As it turns out, there may be no carbon to offset.

A major tenet of the global warming religion, straight from the Book of Gore, has been that the ability of the earth to handle increasing CO2 emissions is finite and that once the "tipping point" is reached, the earth will warm uncontrollably. Well, another climate domino has fallen — the myth that man-made CO2 is leading to climate catastrophe.

December 29, 2009

Response to Climategate: Denial and Attack

Our dependence on the guidance of scientists, economists, educators, and technocrats proves especially toxic when their expertise becomes wedded to money and political influence. Under the guise of shielding us from the complexity of their disciplines, they evolve into closed guilds, guardians of a secret knowledge which we, in our harrowed and hectic lives, have no time and little interest in understanding. As our educational system — itself run by a closed guild — produces generations of students tutored in woman’s studies, postmodern deconstructionism, and the evils of the West, yet ignorant of logic, philosophy, and the rigors of the hard sciences, the problem is compounded.

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Nowhere can this process better be seen than the unfolding drama surrounding the East Anglia email scandal. Centered on one of the three major centers for climate research and data in the world, the hacked emails and software code have ripped open the veil to show us the inner sanctum of science utterly corrupted and politicized. At issue is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — the theory that recent warming trends in global temperatures are caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide from human activity, fostered by industrialization. It has long been a theory which struggled to pass the sniff test, placing undo weight on a trivial component of so-called greenhouse gases, while ignoring the enormous (and obvious) impact of solar activity, water vapor, and cloud cover.
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It has been fascinating to watch this ball of yarn unravel. In what may prove to be the greatest hoax mankind has ever witnessed — most certainly the one with almost unimaginable financial impact globally — we are watching the “settled science” of AGW disintegrate.
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The response of climate scientists to these devastating revelations? Denial and attack. The response of the UN Climate gurus and American and Western policy makers? Denial and attack. The response of the media to this massive global meltdown of AGW “settled science? Silence.

In a very real sense, the hysterical obsession with global warming is a displaced crisis of the soul -- which is the very reason why it so transparently partakes of mythology and is impervious to the light of reason.

A few years ago, I accepted global warming theory with few doubts. I wrote several columns for this paper condemning what I thought were unfair attacks by skeptics and defending the climate scientists.

Boy, was I naive.

Since the Climategate emails and documents revealed active collusion to thwart skeptics and even outright fraud, I’ve been trying to correct the record of my earlier foolishness.
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My mistake was assuming only the purest of motives of the global warming alarmists, while assuming the worst of the skeptics. In fact, the soi-disant moralists of the global warming movement can also exploit their agenda for profit.

Climategate jolted me into confronting the massive fraud and deception by top global warming scientists, who were in a position to twist the peer-review process in their favor, and did so shamelessly.

December 9, 2009

When "a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity"

In brief: utopianism, anti-humanism, indifference of evidence, monocausalism and grandiosity.

Bill Whittle reminds us of what President Eisenhower said in his famous "Beware the Military-Industrial Complex" and how prescient it was

“…the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

December 3, 2009

"I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them"

With Climategate, Sciencs is on the hook or as Daniel Henniger writes Science is DyingI don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry.
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Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event.
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Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

Christopher Booker writesJust imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world - simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?

Should we not then be extremely worried - and even very angry - if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?

No one has put this better than Professor Lindzen, one of the world's leading climatologists, when he wrote: 'Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll-back of the industrial age.'

Lastly and as a slight aside, why so little from the MSM? That one is easy. You need to have a decent analytical brain just to deal with the chain of events. You need to have a decent analytical brain, a mathematical/scientific mind and a good grasp of some very hard statistics to understand what is being done to massage the numbers and to see how significant it is to the chain of events.

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown—in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand—that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.

December 2, 2009

More on the Scientific Scandal of the Century

Gerald Vanderleun mincing no words says the First Lie is the Deepest.Looking back it is easy to see that the emails, far from being just trivial statements exchanged between pals, partners in deceit, and collegial others, were indeed the window into the entire mind-set that drove and sustained what is looking to be the largest and most far-reaching hoax in the history of science; a hoax perpetuated across decades by dozens if not hundreds of "scientists" for the sake of "saving the planet" and money, and fame, and status, and power. Indeed, this hoax makes Bernard Madoff look like a street-corner three-card-monte hustler. Looking through the window provided by the emails you can discern, with no effort of imagination whatsoever, the much greater real-world environment in which the hoax was born, grew, took on a life of its own, and was fed and sustained until it swept the whole world into its maw.

So what will the EPA do now having proposed to regulate carbon dioxide primarily based on the IPCC reports?
the UN hypothesis that increases in GHGs/CO2 will result in significant increases in global temperatures has not been confirmed by comparisons with real world data. Unless it is, attempts to decrease GHG/CO2 emissions in order to significantly change global temperatures are very likely to fail. This is the primary question that the EPA and climate scientists need to address before any control efforts are undertaken.

Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal says Follow the Money Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
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Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Denmark rife with CO2 fraudDenmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.

James Delingpole reminds me that it was Ken Lay of Enron fame who invented carbon trading, a "license to fleece, cheat and rob."
Still, jolly embarrassing for the Danes to get caught red handed, what with their hosting a conference shortly in which the world’s leaders will try, straight-faced, to persuade us that carbon emissions trading is the only viable way of defeating ManBearPig.

Apart from the fact that fears of climate change are completely unfounded, there's other good news.

Scientific skeptics have been there all along. Global warming was always a blatant concoction by normal scientific standards. Scientists I’ve talked to over the years are finally muttering it, in private. Some are looking ashamed. But very few are expressing real outrage at the fraudsters. Too many of them were either suckered or corrupted by money, power, and simple cowardice.

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The sciences are now like Russia after Glastnost: Everybody can see a massive disaster ahead, but nobody wants to say it out loud. We are in that moment of shocked silence just before the bare-naked emperor becomes a target of universal laughter and ridicule. Well, this emperor is buck naked, just like the fairy tale.

As I’ve talked with scientific colleagues in private, they are quietly nodding, yes, yes, of course it’s all BS. Pure model-driven fantasy. Really lousy, deceptive, and fraudulent selection of the data. A gigantic slap in the face for NASA. A thousand greedy grant swingers all over the world. The media chasing scare stories, and fake “scientists” chasing the media. They fed each other lie after lie after lie. It was a very profitable partnership.
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Here’s a bit of truth. Scientists love money. It’s only corporate money that smells bad to them. Government money smells like fresh-mown grass, green and lush.Even if they knew the whole game was a set-up, professors and college presidents went right along with it. Do you have any idea how much pressure college faculty are under to bring in grant money? The big universities get a big chunk of their budgets from “overhead expenses” — payoffs from Washington. Even undergraduate teaching is subsidized by science grants. So are grad students and faculty. In the end, professors don’t get tenure without bringing in a steady supply of money, and after tenure, the pressure only gets worse.